Purpose of the Handbook
The handbook aims at facilitating the design and development process of leather products and informing the people working within those processes. They are not intented as formulas to be simply followed in order to create “sustainable products”. Instead, the overall goal of this handbook is to broaden the scope of designers, marketers, product managers and all other parties involved in creating new leather products. Leather products are usually embedded in a complex and diffuse system that makes it very difficult to design them “more sustainable”. In order to do so, a systemic perspective is needed that takes a wide variety of aspects and interrelations into account that sometimes contradict each other. Therefore, in the case of leather products, design for sustainable development might often be an iterative process involving compromises and uncertainties and requires a constant re-evaluation of design decisions and systemic effects. This handbook is therefore intended to contribute to a capacity-building process through which design and development processes become more systemic, leading towards more sustainable products… more