How have approaches in sustainable design research evolved together (or not) with sustainable design practice? What has been the relationship between both? Has sustainable design research informed/contested/reinforced, etc. sustainable design practice? How?
I am aware of historical overviews of sustainable design practice, how designers have conceived sustainability and acted accordingly over time (e.g. Madge, 1993; Madge, 1997; Knight, 2009; Keitsch, 2012; Ceschin and Gaziulusoy, 2016). Are there similar overviews regarding sustainable design research?
It seems to me that research has been very much overlapping with practice and that two approaches have dominated academic production: a) using practice-based research to enable a better world and b) analysing initiatives from practice to highlight trends and propose sustainable design strategies for practitioners. Am I right? What other relationships have emerged?
it sounds like you are alluding to a literature review or meta-study. you would use such a methodology to answer your questions
Thank you for your comment Brian. I consider asking my peers a valid way to explore these questions, it is certainly not the only one.
what an interesting question. I would agree with your two approaches a) and b) above as being the two key approaches. regarding "propose sustainable design strategies for practitioners" - what is interesting and relevant to your enquiry, I think, is how practice-in-the-wild is actually impacted by academic work. do practitioners actually learn about these sustainable design strategies, try them out, adopt them? if not, why not? if so, who does it? are they the type of design agencies who are already hybrids - that is, with a foot in academia via e.g. EU funded projects? or founded by people with higher degrees in design research? presumably there are many smaller agencies where people don't have time to read academic papers - they develop their own methods that work for them. and other agencies where practitioners also teach - and thereby are in design universities. would be interesting to have a study where some of this mapping is done.
The crux of the issue is that design for sustainability and sustainable design are highly contested fields. We have proposed a dialectic spectrum between reducing unsustainability (eco-modernist approaches) and fostering the emergence of sustainability (radical approaches). This divide and the space in between makes it difficult to map the field as there are different methodological, ideological and ontological admissions.
For example Life Cycle Analysis can reduce the environmental impacts of a project without assessing other problems in the way it will be used etc etc
In the context of your question i would add approaches such as transition design that aim to create a new epistemology of design that is compatible with sustainability.
Hope that was useful
You might want to look at Systems Oriented Design that is focused on designing with and through complexity: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Systems-Oriented-Design
Or similar field adjusting the first one for prototyping of and through living environment performance: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Systemic-Approach-to-Architectural-Performance