Implications of sustainability concepts on design: a critical review

In the last century, Design played an active role in developing and disseminating unsustainable life styles. This article revises the existing heuristics for sustainable development and its implication in the design activity, in order to identify new avenues where design may contribute to a sustainable society. This critical review of the state-of-the-art focuses on the new roles required by Design as a profession and its implications on Design Education. The bottleneck for disseminating these new roles in Brazil includes the lack of lecturers, the lack of didactic material and the lack of methodologies that enable design to work at a systems level, including the design of product-service systems.