Abstract
Design for sustainability needs to apply a societal perspective. The purpose of this paper is to combine the concept of design fixation with higher levels of analysis. Design fixation is used to describe a blind adherence to known concepts during the design process. It is used mostly at the micro level of design with the focus on the activities of an individual designer or a group of designers. In this paper, design fixation gets conceptually lifted to the levels of the organisation and the institution. We ask how the understanding of design fixation helps to achieve higher resource efficiency. Examples of organisational and institutional design fixations are presented. A System Dynamics model is used to simulate the impacts of design fixation on resource use of a sociotechnical laundry systems. Applying this lens suggests that in order to solve societal design fixations, systemic parameters like infrastructure, business models, or policies need to be considered design parameters. The simulation results show that high-level design fixations can have significant impact on resource use.
Highlights
Decreasing resource use and the emissions of human activities to sustainable levels is one of today’s major challenges
We attribute the difference of 2.38 billion kg CO2eq between scenario B to scenario C to the overcoming of organisational design fixations
Design fixation and the many phenomena similar to it seem to be inherent to the human way of problem solving and designing
Summary
Decreasing resource use and the emissions of human activities to sustainable levels is one of today’s major challenges. Given that technical systems are always embedded in organisational and social contexts that interact [3], improvements in product and service are an essential requirement, but not enough and deep and systemic changes are needed in STS for a sustainability transformation. To tackle this problem, the features of an STS with the systems perspective, such as interactions and interdependencies between the system elements, have been found increasingly relevant to tackle the sustainability issue over recent decades [4]. The actor–network theory sees that actors are more important in determining the development of STSs [20], whereas transition theory sees that STSs are determined through societal regimes [7]
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