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.

Bringing together rebound scholars from economics and sustainability science with engineering researchers in a series of structured workshops, the project investigates how prevailing design norms - particularly the prioritisation of efficiency, performance maximisation, and cost reduction - embed growth-oriented assumptions that contribute to systemic expansion. We interrogate engineering as a professional and epistemic practice: what counts as “good design”, which system boundaries are recognised, and which macroeconomic feedbacks remain invisible.

The project develops a new conceptual perspective on rebound in engineering and innovation systems. It argues that rebound is not external to design but co-produced through efficiency-oriented innovation paradigms. Engineering education and professional standards largely exclude consideration of economy-wide feedback effects, leaving expansionary dynamics outside the scope of design responsibility. Addressing rebound therefore requires rethinking the optimisation logics embedded in engineering practice, shifting attention from efficiency-driven performance maximisation toward design principles capable of limiting material and energy throughput.

Through interdisciplinary dialogue, we will develop a conceptual framework for “rebound-aware” or sufficiency-oriented engineering. The project contributes to ecological political economy, innovation studies, and engineering theory by relocating responsibility for rebound upstream in the innovation process. In doing so, it questions the dominant premise within sustainability transitions research that efficiency-led technological innovation can deliver ecological sustainability without confronting underlying growth dynamics.