Exploring sustainable futures through 'Design Orienting Scenarios' - The case of shopping, cooking and eating

摘要

To find routes and implement solutions to sustainable development will require relevant stakeholders from a broad range of societal groups to be involved. To create these routes will need radical ideas and profound visions because clearly current systems are not helping society towards sustainable development. This paper describes part of the SusHouse (Strategies towards the Sustainable Household) project which explored possible strategies for creating sustainable households based on a Factor 20 improvement in environmental efficiency by the year 2050. It describes so called 'Design Orienting Scenarios' (DOSs) using the case of 'shopping, cooking and eating' developed in Hungary, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The DOSs were developed from stakeholder creativity workshops with the aim of providing normative heuristic scenarios to illustrate a range of environmental futures, and thereby informing the design, business and policymaking processes. The variety of developed DOSs ensured that alternative futures were compared, each having concrete proposals for product-service systems. This paper also indicates that the methodological approach has potential for application to other research projects and particularly to design processes that aim to generate products for sustainable futures based on interactive stakeholder participation.