Aesthetics of sustainability at K 2025 Rethinking beauty: How sustainable materials are changing product aesthetics

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Designing with responsible materials often means working with imperfections — or embracing them. At K 2025, Chris Lefteri invites designers to rethink beauty, challenge conventions, and explore a new aesthetic language where recycled content, visible traces, and novel finishes become a badge of value, not compromise.

There’s a paradox at the heart of designing the aesthetics of products with sustainable materials. If you replace a less sustainable material with a more sustainable material but do the job so well that the newer, more responsible version is visually indistinguishable from the original, less responsible version, the question becomes: where does the sustainability story go and how do you communicate your wonderful achievement?

If the bio-based, recycled, low-carbon or whatever flavour of environmentally responsible material you’ve used looks like the original plastic, it’s difficult to communicate the sustainability of it, because the end result looks exactly the same. Visually, there’s no difference. The paradox at the core of what we as designers do is: in our quest to be sustainable, the sustainability story itself often vanishes. Or does it? It’s an important question to ask because so much importance is placed of the environmental angle and making it a feature of the product story - by product I mean anything from car interiors, appliances, sports goods, consumer electronics, etc.