Responsible Advanced Design: Achieving Sustainability through Collaborative Processes

In the current context, designers are faced with ongoing uncertainties and complexities, particularly at social and environmental levels. Amidst these evolving circumstances, design can act as a catalyst to steer innovation towards enhancing quality of life, positioning itself as a tool for the enhancement of the well-being of the environment, community and individuals. In such complex contexts, it is crucial to highlight the importance of design’s ethical responsibility not only concerning its role within a project process, but also in preserving the ecosystem, its resources and its interactions. From this perspective, the approach of Responsible Advanced Design (RAD) emerges, a method based on actions, tools and RI‑oriented strategies aiming to support the development of new design models focused on creating products and services that consider the impact of design decisions from the initial stages and taking into account the diversity of the actors involved. In this context, the need to reaffirm the principle of design responsibility is underscored and, associated with the principles of sustainability and various dimensions of responsibility, leads to the pursuit of “Design Endless Responsibility” in design processes and designer training. This analysis brings forth a conceptual model that merges the dimensions of environmental and social sustainability with the RAD approach, useful both for interpreting complex contexts with a more integrated vision that is attentive to various aspects of sustainability and as a tool to promote more effective actions attentive to tangible and intangible factors of sustainability throughout the project phase. This conceptual model finds its first application in the context of Italian entrepreneurial culture (Made in Italy) and is currently being tested in a nationally-funded research project.