Defining permaengineering: new practices for strong sustainable contexts of design

Abstract Designers can project their vision of the world into reality and share it. They have, in short, the capability to transmit values and points of view through their products. We believe that engineering culture and tools need to shift from a culture of control to a culture of care. The aim of this paper is to propose and test new engineering practices for strong sustainability. We argue that the role and the shape of engineering in strong sustainability contexts are not explored enough in the scientific literature. We propose therefore a form of strong sustainability practice that we call permaengineering. Permaengineering practices are conceived to be in line with strong sustainability contexts. In other words, permaengineering practices should allow achieving activities upper the social floor and within the planetary boundaries. 4 elements will be studied in permaengineering: the ethics of permaengineering, the goal of the practice, the approach to sustainability, and the expertise needed. Those 4 elements will be tested through an interactive tool embedding perma-engineering principles. A seven-month study was conducted to test this tool.