🌱 Can design play a role in achieving justice?
In a world where almost everything around us is designed in some shape or form, design matters. How “things” are made and by whom, how they function, what they deliver and fail to deliver, whose interests they serve and exclude, and what short and long-term impacts they have are fundamentally questions of justice. Responsible design can thereby play a role in achieving energy justice, climate justice, environmental justice, and social justice.
🌱 What roles do traceability and transparency play?
Traceability and transparency are key tools for both environmental and social justice. In line with this, designing products with transparent supply chains, and sourcing materials and labour responsibly, can promote justice. Supply chains are known for lacking transparency and supervision on environmentally and socially just practices.
🌱 What role does profit maximization play in how supply chains are managed?
It is a generally accepted view that the main purpose of businesses is to maximize profit and shareholder value. Supply chains are often also managed with this mindset, creating a domino effect from one actor to another. Many companies look to source parts and partners with as low costs as possible. Many suppliers provide parts or services with such low costs that it is not possible to cover living — or even minimum — wages to the workers. Natural resources are exploited in oversized manufacturing processes that the natural world and ecosystems cannot sustain in the long run.
🌱 What is the significance of the early design phase?
A commonly overlooked aspect in the supply chain or impact of a product or service is the role that the early design phase — when the product’s or service’s parts and characteristics are defined — plays. Decisions made in the design phase can have a large impact on the supply chain as a whole, and therewith on environmental and social justice questions. Decisions made in the design phase notably influence inclusion, accessibility, and equality of the products and services that are produced. From an environmental perspective, the design phase is key to “how long something lasts, what it is made of, if it can be repaired, and what happens to it at the end of life”.[i] Designers are, therefore, in positions of great power and responsibility in defining our surroundings and creating a just world. Design can have a significant impact not just on the goods sold, but also on entire industrial processes and societal systems.
This post has been adapted from a newsletter written by Saskia Tykkyläinen and Christine Nikander for a collaboration between Palsa & Pulk and The E-Waste Column. The newsletter titled “What is the role of design in a just transition?” was originally published in both “The Just Transition Newsletter” and “The E-Waste Newsletter”.
[i] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/news/an-introduction-to-circular-design