What 21,000 design submissions taught me about sustainability |
05-20-2026IMPACT COUNCIL
What 21,000 design submissions taught me about sustainability
Design has moved from aspiration to expectation.
[Photo: Getty Images]
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.
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........