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Better by design? How a Swedish industrial design foundation got involved in the humble task to save our planet with design In 1989, when the Ministry of Enterprise, together with IVA (The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences) and Svensk Form (the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design) founded SVID, the main reason was to boost a competitive Swedish industry. In order to keep an industry at the forefront and keep competitive companies, the aim today is mainly to ensure that our industry is resilient and sustainable – otherwise we will soon discover that we don’t have an industry at all, but a society that moves downhill all the way. By Jonas Olsson, CEO of the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation (SVID)
It’s simple: if our companies don’t make the green transition, they won’t be able to compete in a global market. The same goes for the societal transformation that must change direction from linear to circular. Did you know that 80 per cent of a product’s environmental impact is determined already during the design phase? We know that sustainability is also a prof18 | Issue 137 | December 2021
itable business – both financially and for the planet. Everything we do at SVID, we do collaboratively. We do it together with governmental bodies, regional authorities and, crucially, the design trade and design community. If the design process during the late 1980s still mainly focused
on product/object-orientated industrial design, the process and use of the expression of design have widened and are now the definition of a variety of skills that stretch from product design to systems-orientated design, not to mention the huge impact of Design Thinking, a human-centered approach of problemsolving methodology that is now being taught and lectured at universities around the world. Systems-orientated design uses system thinking in the complexity of systems in laboratory environments and in decision-making processes, like for instance the EU Policy Lab. SVID are using design to future-proof our companies with courses, master classes, design sprints and other tools, all in close
