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Ecological Design

Ecological design is defined as the design of materials and products, projects and systems, environments and communities which are friendly to living species and planetary ecology.¹ The “eco” prefix was used to ninety sighting including eco-city, eco-management, eco-technique, eco- (logical archi) tecture by John Button in 1998 at the first time. After a year, the journal The Ecological Design Association was called as “ecological design”. The inchoate nature of ecological design was referred to the “adding in “of environmental factor to the design process², but later it was focused on the details of eco-design practice such as product system or individual product or industry as a whole. By including life cycle models through energy and materials flow, ecological design was related to the new interdisciplinary subject of industrial ecology. Industrial ecology meant a conceptual tool emulating models derived from natural ecosystem and a frame work for conceptualizing environmental and technical issues.

Overview of human and ecology

All living organism on the earth and water spaces around planet have existed in various system of balanced symbiotic relationship in the past billions of years. However, it has turned out that there are disruptions in the relationship and the seriousness of the breakdown has been raised at the recent time. In the human history, technological means has resulted in numerous human populations through fire, implements and weapons. This dramatic increase in explosive population contributed the introduction of mechanical energies in machine production and there have been improvements in mechanized agriculture, manufactured chemical fertilizers and general health measures. Although the earlier invention inclined energy adjusting the ecological balance, the latest population growth after industrial revolution led to change ecology abnormally³. Through mans’ intelligence, human has extended ecological area involving the whole planet. His activity in ecology realm has broadened increasingly out of around earth surface and beyond atmosphere or beneath the oceans.

History

The first wave of ecological design emerged as ‘green design’ in product and graphic design. The term borrowed from ideas of ecology and environmentalism was used popularly in the late 1980s, but it was already an outdated word, in recent it has given way to ‘sustainable design’. Timothy O’Riordan classified to terms of ‘technocentric’ and ‘ecocentric’ as modes to represent two different outlooks on the world. The ecocentric is based on the attitude of the bioethics and idolization for nature and it prefers to low-impact technology. In other way, technocentric attitude’s feature is based on reverence of progress, efficiency rationality with strong belief of high technology. In the mid–to late 1980, the form of green design represented shallowly as a light green, technocentric, but it raised the whole question of alternative or green lifestyle related to that in the late ‘80s. Eventually this led to connected to the discussion of green movement and green consumerism. Through the best-selling ‘Green Consumer guide’ in 1988, ‘Green consumer’ was magnified on the world and led to be made the green marketing and new green products. In the conference ‘’the Greening of Design” was organized in Manchester in 1992, the Design Research Society included the content on the new economics and new consumer that the vital issues of future will be the global consumption and distribution and Planet-sustaining decisions should be based on wide ranging information about the lifestyles, pattern of production and consumer priorities.⁴ Such ideas became known well to green designers, they gradually refer to their work as “ ecological design”.

Ecological design issues and role of designers

After product- society, many propositions were raised on the unsafe environment. In the conference, ‘The Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet”1992, a proposition which world is presently on the path of energy production and consumption which cannot be sustained was reported. The architect- designer Victor Papanek suggested that industrial design has murdered by creating new species of permanent garbage and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air. For these issues, R. Buckminster Fuller, who was invited as University Professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in 1960s, demonstrated how design could play a central role in indentifying major world problems between 1965 and 1975. That included following contents: • Review and analysis of world energy resources • Defining more efficient uses of natural resources such as metals • Integrating machine tools into efficient systems of industrial production ⁵ Namely, those meant that design profession becomes not what new products to make, but how to reinvent design culture likely to be realized. He noted designers firstly have to realize that design has historically been a dependent practice rather than one based on necessity. The design theorist, Clive Dilnot noted design becomes once again a means of ordering the world rather than merely of shaping products.⁶ As a broader approaching, the conference of ‘Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet’ 1992, emphasized that designers should challenge for facing human problems. These problems were mentioned to six themes: quality of life, efficient use of natural resources, protecting the global commons, managing human settlements, the use of chemicals and the management of human industrial waste, and fostering sustainable economic growth on a global scale.⁷