Danish Design Heritage and Global Sustainability

With a bias for action, this book offers valuable insights into the origins of the much-celebrated Danish design tradition and how it can be employed to create design solutions to address today’s environmental crisis using the planetary boundaries as positive creative constraints.

Danish design has long been revered for its high-quality aesthetics, materials and craftmanship, encouraging sustainability without compromise. This book explores the lessons to be learnt from Scandinavian design ideals, introduces the philosophy and principles of circular economy and showcases the potential power of combining circular economy and design in helping to mitigate the effects of climate change. It presents a range of case study examples across multiple sectors and includes interviews with Danish designers from architecture, furniture, fashion, digital and industrial design, providing unique insights by some of the world’s leading contemporary designers.

Bridging theory and real-world insights and experiences, this book builds on the framework of the 4Rs – The Circular Way: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace to encourage innovation through the replacement of environmentally damaging materials and business models. A must-read for product designers, industrial designers, consultants, business developers, sustainability professionals and students interested in learning how to design and implement circular, sustainable models into practice.