Ben Lowe

Dr Ben Lowe

Small Group Project 2027-28

Is Rebound Designed In? Engineering Paradigms and the Political Economy of Efficiency

Technological innovation and efficiency improvements are widely positioned as the primary route to ecological sustainability. Yet efficiency-driven innovations routinely generate rebound effects: cost reductions stimulate increased production and consumption, offsetting or even reversing environmental gains. While rebound has been extensively analysed in economics and other social-scientific analyses of sustainability, it is largely absent from engineering design theory and practice. This project asks whether rebound is not merely a market response to innovation, but partially designed in through optimisation logics embedded in contemporary engineering.

More information

Areas of interest

Sustainability Ecological Economics Circular Economy Economics Engineering Sufficiency Innovation Design

Cohort

FG12

Biography

Ben Lowe is a Researcher at the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield. His research sits across ecological economics, circular economy and sustainability, with a particular interest in rebound effects and the limits of efficiency-led approaches to environmental problems. He is interested in what happens when technological improvements meet wider economic and social systems, and why using resources more efficiently does not always mean using fewer resources overall. Working across economics, engineering and sustainability science, his current work explores how ideas such as sufficiency and ecological limits might reshape the way we think about innovation, design and sustainability.

Biographical details correct as of 16.09.26