Reorienting sustainable design: practice theory and aspirational conceptions of use

Abstract

This article will show how conventional conceptions of use in design are challenged by social practice theory, particularly when this theory is brought into a relation with the aspirations of sustainable design. Sustainable design has in the past claimed too much transformative agency for 'green' things, overlooking the resilience of unsustainable practices and their complex, structural nature, as well as the need for new designs to be taken up in existing or constitutive sustainable practices. Social practice theory shifts focus from the agency of material things, to a more nuanced account of everyday contexts of social practice. This perspective offers significant opportunities to reframe design more relationally by underscoring the importance of a social research agenda and by broadening design conceptualisations of use. In this paper we critically examine conceptions of use at work in three design disciplines: industrial design, visual communications design and fashion design and consider how these conceptions might be productively challenged and reoriented by the relational insights of social practice theory.