Future Centered Design: Designing for Sustainable Business

This paper outlines the changing attitudes of business leaders towards sustainability and the opportunities this presents to product and information designers. Smart business leaders are beginning to understand the importance of sustainable practices to their success. Resource scarcity, increased regulation, and need to safeguard their brand reputation are a few of the key drivers for this mind shift. Just as businesses have to reconsider the way they do business, designers have to re-think aspects of the way they design to participate fully in the creation of a sustainable world. We have to be prepared to rethink our design process, our materials, our product lifecycle, and our notion of customer experience. Information designers and product designers have to work together to create the next generation of sustainability products. While product designers play a direct role, information designers play just an important role by gathering critical information across the enterprise and presenting them in a consumable way to allow decision makers to make informed sustainable choices.