What 21,000 design submissions taught me about sustainability

For the past two years, I’ve had a front-row seat to one of the largest and most rigorous datasets in global design. Each year, the iF DESIGN AWARD receives over 10,000 submissions spanning 93 categories of design. Participants include industry giants like Apple and Coca-Cola, to startups and independent design studios that are actively shaping the field’s future. Taken together, these entries offer more than a snapshot of excellence. They reveal where design is actually headed.

What emerges from recent winners is a growing shift: In many categories, sustainability is no longer a differentiator, it’s the baseline for great design. The most compelling work today goes even further, embedding sustainability into the logic of how projects are imagined, produced, and scaled. It shows up across industries, not only in expected areas like automotive, packaging, or architecture, and is increasingly the result of collaborative, cross-disciplinary teamwork.

Sustainable design is maturing. Increasingly, it is structural, systemic, and embedded. There is still a long way to go, but this shift carries real implications for how consumers and the industry should be defining what design excellence means.

THE MATURATION SIGNAL

When I look at the projects that were awarded by iF in 2026, I see sustainability’s growing ubiquity. Part of this is because participants now know that 20% of their overall score is based on social and environmental considerations. But part of it is because the design world broadly recognizes that good design is also good for people, planet, and business. 

The Grand Ring—the unifying architectural structure of Expo 2025 Osaka—is a striking example. Spanning the entire exposition grounds, it’s an enormous undertaking that could easily have been treated as a temporary structure with a short lifespan and little afterthought. Instead, its architects designed it from the outset to be demountable and circular, using cross-laminated timber and traditional Japanese Nuki joinery. The sustainability wasn’t added to the brief; it was the brief.

This maturation signal is the first pattern I’m seeing. Half a decade ago, sustainability might have meant a product made from recycled materials—a worthy goal, but a simpler one. The designs rising to the top today tackle tougher challenges: longevity, reparability, systems thinking. Crucially, these elements now enter at the concept phase, versus being added as an afterthought (because they cannot).

THE INVISIBLE SUSTAINABILITY SIGNAL

The second pattern in this year’s winners is harder to spot, and that’s precisely the point. The most effective designs led with performance but were inherently sustainable. For example, YKK’s zipper repair system isn’t positioned as an eco-product; it simply provides a better zipper offering. YKK is the world’s largest zipper manufacturer producing roughly half of the world’s zippers annually. This product makes it possible for individual users to repair missing zipper “teeth,” thereby extending the lives of their garments, bags, etc..

It is a bold business decision, based on circular principles. The waste reduction is significant, but it’s the consequence of smart design and good engineering, making it so users themselves don’t have to care about sustainability for the design to deliver it. This is a meaningful shift. For years, purchasing sustainably required consumers’ willingness to pay more or accept inconvenience, in exchange for a values-driven choice. Winning designs today have sustainability embedded into the product logic in such a way that it almost becomes invisible. The user simply gets something that works better and lasts longer.

THE COLLABORATION SIGNAL

The third pattern looks at the teams behind the designs. Most of the standout work over the past couple of years since sustainability became the fifth equal jurying criteria in the iF award program, isn’t the output of a single visionary designer. It comes from interdisciplinary and often cross-organizational teams.

Harvard’s ChoLab is a useful illustration. This device enables rapid, on-site cholera testing in vulnerable communities, putting water safety diagnostics directly in the hands of community health workers rather than waiting on slow, costly, long-distance laboratory infrastructure. The creation of this product required public health researchers, engineers, the communities themselves, and local government support to define what the solution actually needed to be; it was not the result of a top-down brief from a single discipline.

This is the collaboration signal: Nearly always, sustainability represents a systems problem, and systems problems don’t typically yield to single industries, functions, or geographies. Indeed, many of the best projects showcase the involvement of engineers, supply chain specialists, behavioral scientists, end users, and others in the design process. When the starting brief is clear, this collaborative process nearly always results in a better solution. 

WHAT THE FIELD SHOULD TAKE AWAY

Recent iF DESIGN AWARD winners highlight several truths the broader design industry should absorb. First, sustainability is now a baseline. Second, the most interesting sustainability work doesn’t shout to be known, but is deeply embedded. Third, complex problems demand complex solutions, so the best designs today are interdisciplinary. 

Over 21,000 submissions from 70 countries over two years doesn’t offer a crystal ball, but with key insights also distilled in the annual iF Design Trend Report, it’s as close to a real-time diagnostic of global design as I know. And for now, the diagnosis is clear: Sustainability has moved from aspiration to expectation. The question is, how can sustainability constraints be used to make great designs even better to help people and protect our planet while remaining commercially viable. It’s a worthy mission.

Lisa Gralnek is global head of sustainability and impact for iF Design, managing director of iF Design USA Inc., and creator/host of the podcast, FUTURE OF XYZ.

View the full article