Creativity, sustainable design and risk management

A question that often arises when requirements of sustainability are sought in design projects is whether creativity has any place in such design interventions. Regardless if the perspective for exploring alternatives of unsustainable situations is short, medium or long-term, designers as producers of culture strive for creative outcomes in all their projects. Yet when sustainability is a rigid requirement, designers often resort to evaluation methods or tools, specifically those that result in instrumental rather than exploratory design interventions. In today's obsession with risk management, where there is a constant preoccupation to be able to predict risks associated with our environment, the economy, our societies, etc., can designers liberate the design process from such instrumentality and indeed conceptualize far beyond specific points of environmental inefficiencies in existing products, services, buildings or spaces? The international discourse related to sustainable development is embedded in a risk management paradigm that valorizes a preventive approach. This implies that the design intervention is meant to appease unsustainable symptoms. This paper seeks to highlight the importance of a variety of temporal and spatial design approaches for achieving sustainable creativity. By thinking outside the boundaries of the given problem, design for sustainability has the capacity to rethink the social and cultural assumptions embedded in the everyday. This process of reimaging a different future rather than focusing only on the redesign of more eco-efficient artefacts may be one entry point for introducing creativity in design for sustainability. This paper will present a series of design projects to illustrate the difference in thinking and outcome when design for sustainability is thought of in these varying temporal and spatial perspectives. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.