Design for Healthcare Sustainability: Ethical implications of eco-design research

The growing interest in environmental sustainability is the result of a new cultural awareness focused on the holistic conceptions of wellbeing and justice. However, this attention is also moved by economic considerations. The increasing awareness of the environmental impacts of medical treatments is a prompting example: the optimization of resource consumption and the reduction of wastes can lead to huge economic and environmental benefits. However, sustainable solutions might arise problems with regard to the patients’ well- being. When talking about eco-sustainability, the ethics of design is usually considered as implicit; however this carries the risk of not being able to create a system that is ethically right. This study aimed to examine a practice-based approach to ethics in design projects addressing environmental sustainability in the healthcare field. Combining different theoretical approaches from bioethics, environmental and design ethics, this research determined a set of practical guidelines for the implementation and assessment of ethics into design practice. We investigated the responsibilities of design towards all the stakeholders involved, on the basis of the Bivins’ bioethical obligation items. Then, the ethical implications were analysed by the definition of possible scenarios, starting from the Triple Bottom Line theory. Starting from these scenarios, the design team was involved in internal brainstorming sessions to define the personal motivations and ethical limits within the project. This enabled the creation of a detailed set of guidelines in the form of open questions. This approach has been applied to a case study on hemodialysis sustainability, that allowed to test this ethical approach.