Some Aspects of Using Universal Design as a Redesign Strategy for Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability is something that unites humankind and the important 2015 UN Climate Change Conference manifested this and was described by many as our last chance. A shifting towards sustainability through design is a challenge for managers and policymakers of organizations since the existing system or product could be complex and may have difficulty to adopt such a shift. This paper explores how organizations and their designers and developers could benefit from having a predictable process to follow for conducting such a shift, since numerous challenges are associated with costs and revenues. While universal design (UD) is a design philosophy closely associated with the sustainable design, an advanced perspective of UD could be implied as a redesign strategy for existing design and may be used as a radical design and innovation strategy for sustainability. In this paper, some of the aspects of UD as a redesign strategy for sustainability are addressed. Based on the previous theoretical frameworks, a UD approach for redesigning towards sustainability was formulated and discussed.