DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABILITY APPLIED TO WORKSPACES

Due to the behavioral changes of society in a dynamic and interconnected world, workspaces have gotten a new meaning. Designers must understand the needs and desires of the final users in order to create something that fulfills them and creates a whole experience out of it. By adopting living systems “ecological” worldview, design will require a higher level of interrelationships between natural, human and built systems, and the disciplines within them (Boecher et al, 2009, p xii) describe the achievement of a broader integration of systems within the sustainability movement as an “Integrative Design Process (IPD)”. The aim of this paper is to comprehend how Product-Service System Design methodologies can be applied in Interior Design with the means of designing a workspace that by being co-created by the users, can become more sustainable and that can satisfy better the end user. Besides, the relation of Interior Design and Sustainability, that comes after the comprehension of it in two levels. The first one is a social level, associated to the well-being of the end user in a workspace (lighting, insulation and many other specs of the spaces), while the second level is the study of the environmental design of the spaces (materials & products) supported by Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) studies, to cognize about the carbon footprint left in the world through all the life cycle phases. become crucial on the decision making, since they can change the perception we have about materials or furniture chosen within a project. Finally, with means of supporting the ideas exposed and to have a better understanding of it, we expose some case studies. The aforementioned research is part of the outcome of an ongoing thesis held for a Master of PSSD at the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano and part of the Farb Research (ISBN: 9788891777201). Keywords: Product-ServiceSystems, Interior Design, Sustainability, Co-Design