Op 20 januari organiseert de interessegroep architectuur van het KNVI samen met GIA en NAF een insight sessie over design for sustainability. Het initiatief komt uit een werkgroep op het onderwerp bestaande uit Danny Greefhorst, Patricia Lago, Martijn Sasse, Wouter Paul Trienekens en Gijs van Schouwenburg. Zij hebben daarbij het volgende position statement.

Position statement

In a time where the complexity of our environment and the problems we are faced with seem to increase, we want to provide a new perspective towards sustainability. The complexity and the problems we face do not have definite solutions. Complexity needs to be embraced, and issues (rather than problems) should be looked at from all relevant perspectives and at all levels. In a world that is increasingly digital, we believe that digitalization is an important piece of the puzzle towards sustainability. Digitalization has the power to make our lives easier or more difficult, it changes our behaviour for the better or the worse. A design approach is needed to steer digitalization toward sustainability, to balance the desired qualities of software, and to make design decisions for sustainability explicit. 

Sustainability is often seen from a specific point of view, but we want to take a broad perspective and take multiple points of view into account. We want to take the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders into account, and address the entire life cycle from rough material through production and use up till and including recycling. We focus on the role of information technology, software and data, because it is an important enabler for improvement and innovation in this digital era. We want to understand the impact of information technology on economic, social and ecological aspects of sustainability. We want to inform people involved in information technology about how they can take sustainability into account. We take a design perspective because it makes sustainability actionable for IT-professionals.

We are convinced that sustainability is a systemic quality, which requires a systemic perspective and systemic measures. This is a much broader perspective on quality than we are used to. We look at the ecosystem as a whole, which implies looking at a system of systems. Systems exist at a lot of different levels, and they influence each other; a system at a particular level may impact the evolution of higher and lower level systems. Technological systems influence economic, social and ecological systems. A sustainable system needs to interact with the systems in its environment, balance their concerns, and receive feedback on its actions. Such systems are typically complex adaptive systems; systems whose evolution is hard to predict. They thrive on complexity. Designers of technological systems can learn from social and natural systems, which are inherently adaptive in nature.

As a consequence sustainability cannot be simplified to a characteristic of an artefact. Sustainability is the continuous process of adaptation in order to find an equilibrium between influences that result in an optimum state of a system that meets the quality requirements of multiple stakeholders in multiple perspectives and to be resilient to find such an equilibrium over multiple periods of time.

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