Green design

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Green design, or ecological design, is the way of designing that puts the environmental impact of objects at the centre throughout their life cycle: from the extraction of raw materials to production, from transport to use, through to disposal. A "green" object uses less material and energy, lasts a long time, and can be repaired, dismantled and recycled. More than a style, it is an attitude that today concerns every field of design.

The origins: the 1960s and 1970s

Modern environmental awareness was born in 1962 with Silent Spring by the American biologist Rachel Carson, which denounced the harm caused by pesticides such as DDT and gave rise to the environmental movement. In the world of design the pioneers were the inventor Buckminster Fuller, concerned about the Earth's finite resources, the landscape architect Ian McHarg with Design with Nature (1969) and above all Victor Papanek. In his book Design for the Real World (1971), translated into more than twenty-four languages, Papanek accused industrial design of creating "new species of permanent garbage" and polluting the air, and argued that the designer shares responsibility for nearly all our environmental mistakes. To demonstrate an alternative he designed a transistor radio made from tin cans and powered by the heat of a candle, intended for poor countries. His ideas are linked to those of moral design and the Craft Revival.

Sustainable development and the circular economy

In 1987 the United Nations report Our Common Future, known as the Brundtland Report, defined sustainable development as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Even the masters of Good Design included the environment among the criteria of good design: among the ten principles of Dieter Rams, the Braun designer, one states that good design "is environmentally friendly". In 2002 the German chemist Michael Braungart and the American architect William McDonough published Cradle to Cradle: at the end of their life products should become either "biological nutrients", returning to nature, or "technical nutrients", going back into production. This is the idea behind the circular economy.

Tools and laws

Today ecological design uses precise tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA), which measures a product's impact at each stage and helps choose materials and processes. The rules have become law: the EU Ecodesign Directive, introduced in 2005 and extended in 2009, sets mandatory environmental requirements for energy-related products and led, for example, to the gradual phase-out of incandescent light bulbs; since 2025 smartphones and tablets sold in the Union must meet requirements for durability, repairability and software updates. In 2024 the EU also adopted a right to repair directive.

Green design today

Recycled and recyclable materials, plant-based plastics, certified wood, single-material products that are easy to separate, reduced packaging, modular objects that are repaired instead of thrown away: green design has changed the way companies and designers work. Yet a fundamental question, already central to Papanek's work, remains open: the most ecological product is often the one that lasts longest, or the one that need not be made at all.