Sustainability (or the philosophy of) emanates ideas with implications that strike at the contemporary foundations of our daily existence. In time, sustainability theory (or some derivation, as today it comes conjoined to almost anything no matter how “unsustainable”) will transform the way we live. However, it will not do this in its own right. Rather, transformation will occur through the means and constructs that already exist and that are imbued with powerful agency for change, such as industrial design.

Local and global issues of unsustainability such as ‘climate change’ have become common knowledge, regardless of ongoing polemics to the degree of their human root cause. While their severity compounds, so the prospect of a prosperous future and conditions of life steadily alter. Humanity’s troubles may result in our inability to exist in continuum, to sustain the legacy of life. We find ourselves paradoxically grappling in a challenging and complex position of trying to save ourselves from ourselves through a magnitude of multi-layered political, economic, and social agendas, ever while limits are met by boundaries being further stretched.

There is no unified understanding let alone an undisputed written theory of sustainability. Simply put, sustainability is the ‘ability to sustain’, but this too does not tell us why, how or what we need to sustain. Therefore, sustainability is an idea that constantly bares elaboration, which in turn necessitates that we make judgements based on ethical values. It is complex philosophically to deal with how and why we should now manage our ecology because of our ‘current situation’ into ways that both determine and maintain us through a quality of existence worth sustaining and of reciprocating sustenance. The truth is life as we know it (or knew it) is no longer sustainable. It takes a long-term view of humanity over time to begin to comprehend unsustainability and to understand how necessarily implicated we, and our lifestyles, have become.

An unquantifiable portion of industrial design outcomes, though they may sustain or positively add to some aspect of our lives, simultaneously contribute to our unsustainability in some (other) way. Many of the design icons of the last century (e.g. from the fields of domestic appliances, personal transportation and connectivity, to office and business techno-eccentricities) simultaneously constitute energy and resource depletion, multiple forms of pollution, and end up as ‘post consumer waste’. The designed objects, processes, services, and systems within industry, business, transport, and the ever-sprawling domestic domain, design our behaviours, attitudes and values. Today the emerging link between industrial design and our unsustainability has established that we acknowledge that the two play determining roles in each other. They have deep links; unsustainability is designed. It may not be believable nor helpful to suggest that during the emergence of the industrial design profession, the practice itself could have been designed to ‘design for sustainability’. Historically, design outcomes that improved our lives via simple offerings of convenience, saved time and labour, without any awareness of broader relations over time designed us into contradiction.

As mentioned, industrial design and sustainability are deeply interrelated, but the question is in what way should they be now and in the future? Sustainability is currently creating gaps in industrial design practice. Industrial design and versions of sustainability are pushed together in many different ways and forms. However, the success of such outcomes in terms of true sustainability can falter due to assumptions made about the concept. So, how should this type of thinking alter design practice? Contemporary designers are grappling to exact practical ways of addressing unsustainability, dealing with the dichotomy that our dependent existence is made both better and worse by design outcomes. The design of industrial design is changing.