A normative direction: social, moral, and design perspectives of safe- and- sustainable- by- design
Fernando C. Lit (Maastricht University)
D. Perfigli (TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
Mart van Uden (Maastricht University)
I. Krstulović (TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
M.M. Weber (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
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Abstract
Safe- and- Sustainable- by- Design (SSbD) aspires to be a transformative concept, one that would create a new social contract between science, technology, and society and align sustainable (material) innovation with societal needs (Brennan & Valsami- Jones, 2021). By incorporating regenerative principles, SSbD will deliver a “net positive impact across all stakeholder levels (nature, societies, customers, suppliers and partners, shareholders and investors, and employees)” (Soeteman- Hernandez et al., 2024, p.364). Currently, the social aspect still lags behind safety and environmental aspects in predominant SSbD approaches (Apel et al., 2024). For instance, social assessment remains at a low level of implementation and methodological maturity in various SSbD frameworks. Moreover, these frameworks tend to focus on the measurement of predefined categories of social / societal impacts (e.g. through tools such as S- LCA), but they tend to overlook, for instance, how to accommodate issues outside those predefined lists, or how to deal with
tradeoff s (Apel et al., 2024). Typically, they also focus on the chemical level and molecular substitution, thus missing out on perspectives at the product, process, and system level. In this poster, we describe complementary, sometimes critical, perspectives from social science, ethics, and (product) design that can help to advance SSbD.