Being a product designer in the 21st century is full of uncertainty. With the rise of AI and companies asking designers to be more skilled in constantly emerging tools with only senior or higher roles available, product designers must navigate an industry that seems poised to squeeze many of us out and make obsolete. As I think through these issues, I try to maintain a balance of optimism and practicality. This often leads me to think about the past. I believe the future of design will always need humans and it must be sustainable. And while sustainability is a relatively new buzzword in lockstep with the growing collective consciousness around climate change, it is not a new concept.

Great design has always been sustainable

Sustainability and design have longed worked together. It started with reduce, reuse, and recycle concepts underpinning the design of durable products. For example: you buy a high quality dress, it wears down and you mend it, and at the end of its long life it's still strong enough to be repurposed into an apron or rag. This has often stemmed from a mindset of necessity, not sustainability even if the byproduct was sustainable.

In the modern era of digital products and seemingly-endless resources, we need to reintroduce sustainability. Designers have built and continued sustainable ideas like minimalism, user-centered thinking, and even efficient loading screens to cut down on resource use and short attention spans. They have understood that great design must work well for humans in the most efficient and cost-effective way. This applied to physical product design like chairs and toasters and now to complex software like apps and POS systems.

Occam's razor is not just a philosophical problem-solving principle turned annoying aphorism—it's the most sustainable way to build something. As we continue to use technology to build products, it is tempting to overcomplicate our solutions with AI-generated everything, endless features, and flashy animations. But this has a cost. Not just in terms of water and electricity-guzzling data centers but in reducing product value and losing the focus on helping the user with their core issue in the process. This has always been the challenge for product design and will continue to be as we get distracted building features, not solving problems.

Business goals benefit from sustainability

Sustainability—and sometimes accessibility—can be seen as an optional step that is a nice-to-have but not a necessity. But design aims to help create solutions that people want or need and if provided correctly, they will be valuable on the market. If our design solutions have an unsustainable environmental impact, then it is not a good design and must be redone. As companies worry about both expensive missteps and missing the moment to capitalize in the market, it is all the more important that good design thinking be part of the process from the start of a project with opportunities to validate choices with users.

We know that change is inevitable and good solutions will bring competitors. Businesses—and designers—can never sit still. We will need to continue to innovate and find the next great design solution. All the more reason to create sustainable solutions that can sustain your business for the long-term while you balance designing for the future.