Nonlinear, not Necessarily Circular, Design for Sustainability

Abstract: This project has been an exploration into how sustainability is understood and its challenges framed within design. But the reader undertaking the task of going through this document will find more about carrying in urban transportation which has been the area of application. Probing the underlying assumptions upon which our solutions toward a sustainable future rest, the research identifies the trio of classical social theory, a reductionist approach and domination as an outlook to be at the root of our failure to transform our ways of life. In an attempt to undertake a nonlinear design for sustainability, the project takes the rejection of these assumptions as the basis from which it explores the area of carrying in urban transportation. Studying the phenomenon of car-dependence, it unveils the perceptions around the notion of carrying that have been shaped over the last decades with the assumption of the car as the default mode of transport within the city. Different groups of people can be ‘carless’ for a variety or combination of reasons; ideology, lack of financial or spatial capacity for owning a car, living in areas without adequate road development, being under-aged for driving, etc. These groups may walk, skate, scoot, cycle, ride buses, trams, trains or monorails to get to places they want to go. Yet with them they carry products that are designed within a picture of the urban setting in which cars are indispensable and indisputable. Thus, by being complicit to this image of transportation, designers are increasingly delegating the control of how we move ourselves, others, objects, and indeed how we organize the urban environment and ourselves as a society, to cars and the unsustainability surrounding them. The outcome of the project is a two part solution for additional carrying capacity for cycling without imposing an inclusive space on the bicycle or requiring sturdy bags furnished with bulky attachment elements. This outcome is used to sketch out a potential set of elements by which vehicles and carrying products can have a more active relationship with each other and us in order to decouple the wide variety of products and systems in the transport landscape from the ubiquitous influence of cars.