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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."[1] 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.[2]
The idea helps connect scattered efforts to address environmental issues in architecture, agriculture, engineering, and ecological restoration, among others. The term was first used by John Button in 1998. [citation needed] 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.[3] With the inclusion of life cycle modeling techniques, ecological design was related to the new interdisciplinary subject of industrial ecology.