Biomimicry, S.PSS and DRE: Designerly Strategies to Reduce the Knowledge Gap between Design and Nature

Abstract

Issues of clean and safe sustainable renewable energy are pertinent. It becomes even more relevant when addressing these issues to undergraduate product design students. As design students are frequently exposed to sustainability by means of theoretical concepts such as Biomimicry, they often fail to correlate their bio-inspired concepts against nature’s genius. Design students also face complex conceptual challenges when designing for sustainability. We’ve added sustainable product service systems applied to distributed renewable energy to the synthesis of a design course at a HEI in South Africa and we unpack some of our findings in this paper.