Design in Context: Sustainability, Health and Safety, and Social/Ethical Issues
This domain tests whether you can judge a design beyond function: its environmental load across life-cycle stages, its risks to users and makers, and its social and ethical consequences. Questions ask for reasoned trade-offs, not slogan answers.
Core concepts
- Sustainability: apply the waste hierarchy - refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, recover - and life-cycle assessment (LCA) from material extraction through manufacture, use, disposal. Consider embodied energy, water, transport, recyclability and biodegradability.
- Health and safety: identify hazards, assess risk (likelihood and severity), and apply the hierarchy of control - eliminate, substitute, engineer controls, administrate, then PPE. Workshop examples include dust extraction, machine guards and safe isolation.
- Social and ethical issues: fair labour, conflict minerals, accessibility and inclusive design, privacy, planned obsolescence and affordability. Identify who benefits and who bears the risk.
Worked example
Package a small electronic device. Expanded polystyrene is light and protective but fossil-based, bulky and poorly recycled locally. Moulded pulp is renewable, compostable and protective when designed with ribs, but heavier and energy-intensive to dry. Recycled card with a paper wrap is widely recyclable but needs an internal cushion. Reasoning: choose moulded pulp plus recycled card, then drop-test to confirm protection. The decision weighs disposal, transport mass and function; 'eco-friendly' alone is not a justification.
Traps
- Claiming a product is sustainable because one part is recyclable.
- Ignoring the use phase, which may dominate energy use.
- Listing PPE as the first safety measure instead of eliminating the hazard.
- Treating ethical issues as opinions without naming the affected group.