Design For Survivability A Participatory Design Fiction Approach To Sustainability

Design For Sustainability (D4S) is an established and popular perspective for discussing environmental, economic, and social considerations in product design. Design participants use the concept of Sustainability to discuss short- and long-term externalities of a product's lifecycle (such as fossil-fuel consumption, recyclability, and habitat impacts) from their shared perspective of a sustainable world. This work attempts to broaden D4S by proposing "Design For Survivability", a methodology for discussing products through stories of the diverse technologies, societies, and other objects they might drive to extinction. A Survivability decision process is proposed, as is an experiment comparing design discussions and outcomes between Survivability and Sustainability, and suggestions are made for analytical techniques to be adopted from ecology and conservation biology.