Eco-Design and Ecological Transition

Conclusion

At the end of this book, the assessment is mixed. In the 1960s, enthusiastic designers presented sustainable design as the way out of the dead ends of our market society, where the increasing consumption of objects was synonymous with progress. The chemical industry, on the other hand, was under growing social pressure to limit the pollution it caused. It progressively developed a new design method: technocentric eco-design, based on the idea that it was necessary to evaluate the environmental impacts and then reduce them.

It is clear that more than 50 years after the first texts on sustainable design and technocentric eco-design, a solution allowing the human species to live peacefully in a respected, non-degraded and sustainable environment has not been found.

Technocentric eco-design is the most common and perhaps the easiest to understand and implement. It aims to minimize the environmental impacts of a product compared to similar products on the market and at all stages of its life cycle. It consists of identifying these impacts and then seeking solutions to reduce them. It allows us to improve what already exists, but the pollution remains. Also called environmental design by Petit (2015), it aims to design products by drawing on the resources available to meet the needs of the human species and limiting the pollution emitted. The environment is at the service of the human species. The ecological transition is therefore far away.

For its part, sustainable design ...