Transforming the world

The truth is that as the graphic above shows, the more we earn, the more we consume and the more we damage the environment. However, we cannot forget saying that money also implicate more human development. Therefore our objective should be the yellow square, where high human development meets low ecological footprint.

The way? Education. Moreover this education should be different in the more or less developed countries. In our case less consumption is by far the objective. In less developed countries the objective should be not copy what "first world" have done, but learn straight away in a sustainable way not to make the mistakes we made.

For my surprise, the other day I learn that even if it seems a trendy topic, sustainability issues are not new. In the early 60s,  The World Wide Fund for Nature was founded (1961), a non-governmental organization that os nowadays the largest independent conservation organization with over 5 million supporters worldwide, working in more than 100 countries, supporting around 1,300 conservation and environmental projects.

Ten years later Greenpeace was founded and from then until these days hundreds of different organizations have started and have gone forward some steps for making our world a better one.

3P's form what we call sustainable development: people, planet and profit. And as designers we have much to do in this three P's because we design for the real world and the world needs to be taken into account. Not only users, not only how much money we earn, but also our planet. Sustainability used to be seen as an anthropometric theory in which human needs were in the center but what about if instead of human we put the earth in the center?

Real design goes though products to meanings and these meanings have much to do with the way in which we think of the world as a place to respect instead of seeing it as an amount of resources we have.

This means not only design but also metadesign, a concept that reach meanings, signs of design. A design which goes from details to social transformation.

Because we all take part in this transformation and it's our choice to transform it in the good or the bad way.