Sustainable Development Requires an Integrated Design Discipline to Address Unique Problems

Sustainable development has taken centre stage in our global conscience. Until recently, we have been focused on economic prosperity, driven by the mechanistic worldview of the scientific method. Once the cracks appeared, as a society, we have been looking for a deeper meaning and approach to life. Through a literature review, the paper proposes that current 'experts', using the engineering profession as an example, are not able to address the wicked problems confronting us, since they prevail within the reductionist mode of knowledge production. We need design thinkers - who are natural systemic practitioners - to solve systemic problems, which is characterised by sustainable development. A future second paper will draw on the behavior of non-linear, complex adaptive systems as self-organizing emergence at the edge of chaos and re-interpret the design thinking process in a way which encompasses the intuitive, non-linear and qualitative way in which sustainable development problems need to be addressed.