Lettenmeier, A sustainable level of material footprint - Benchmark for designing one-planet lifestyles

How can we know which lifestyles are sustainable? How can we make our lifestyles sustainable? How can designers contribute to sustainable lifestyles? This thesis provides answers to these questions. It develops a benchmark for sustainable lifestyles: 8 tonnes of material footprint. This is only 20% of the current Finnish average. By applying the 8 tonnes benchmark, households were able to cut their Lifestyle Material Footprint by tens of percents when redesigning their lifestyles. The thesis shows what a sustainable lifestyle could look like and how the Lifestyle Material Footprint can help detect the critical factors behind our unsustainable lifestyles. For designers, the thesis has developed an orientation framework for Design for One Planet (Df1P). The framework provides numerous examples for sustainable solutions to be developed by product design, service design, infrastructure planning and communication design. The thesis thus hopes to inspire designers to adopt Df1P in their work.