Designing for Sustainable Development: a case study of takeaway culture in Serbia

Abstract

Since contemporary culture, in its diversity of forms, includes special forms of design, the analysisof connections between design and different patterns of life is imposed as one of the important tasks of theoretical thinking. Due to its involvement in everyday practices, and a certain permeation with life activities and processes, but also due to a specific connection to daily visions of life, designing is not just an artistic activity, but also the activity that changes / creates our patterns of life. In its analysis, the author uses the capability approach. Within this approach, development is seen as the expansion of human capability to lead more worthwhile and more free lives (Sen, 1999). This approach makes a clear distinction between what people are free to do to improve their well-being (‘capabilities’) and what they actually choose to do (‘functioning’). Therefore, to understand and improve design (and our lives), we should understand and improve our choices. The author analyses the connections between the choices and designing for sustainable development. Our assumption is that design, in order to be responsible, must offer opportunities that lead to expected and (yet) unespected choices with a long-term justification, regardless of the short-term utilitarian nature of such choices. The aim of this analysis is to determine the degree of variety of the offered possibilities and the causal connection between the offered possibilities and choices, i.e. the perception of the offered choices and their understanding. This is a preliminary analysis done on a smaller representative sample with a focus on design of the machines and the process of offering drinks to go and takeaway food.