Ecological design

Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.

The idea helps connect scattered efforts to address environmental issues in architecture, agriculture, engineering, landscape architecture, and ecological restoration, among others. The term was first used in architecture by Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan in 1996. The term had been in common use in landscape architecture since the 1960s. In 1993, a conference was held at Arizona State University that included many ecological design leaders, including Ian McHarg. The conference essays were collected in a book edited by George Thompson and Frederick Steiner titled Ecological Design and Planning (1997).

Ecological design was originally conceptualized as the "adding in "of environmental factor to the design process, but later turned to the details of eco-design practice, such as product system or individual product or industry as a whole. With the inclusion of life cycle modeling techniques, ecological design was related to the new interdisciplinary subject of industrial ecology.