Just so we're clear on this from the very outset: design is not the slickness of packaging, the visual appeal of an expensive product or, for that matter, a pursuit of the wealthy. Design is, simply, the understanding and application of efficiency.

Good design leads to the elimination of clutter, the smoothness of operation and the ease of usability.

Good design isn't some esoteric technical thing that only designers are clued into: rather, it's a life principle that applies to all people, products, processes and interactions.

I'm going to come back to this wheezy theorizing in just a short while, but first let me regale you with a silly little anecdote. I promise to entertain.

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My neighbourhood department store is my debit card's favourite exercise spot. Each time I visit it, my card sniffs the air, begins wagging its tail and joyously sprints out of my wallet with all the exuberance and vaguely idiotic innocence of an unleashed retriever. The fault is my own. I am a distracted shopper, and my debit card is only too eager to take advantage of my spaciness. The usual pattern is that I set out with the intention of buying a specific item, like a bag of sugar or a packet of milk or whatever. But intentions are like punctured prophylactics. They can lead to an embarrassment of undesired offspring. Take the other day, for example, when I set out to Thom's bakery and department store in Frazertown for a can of pesticide, for to deal with a minor cockroach crisis in my kitchen. Smarmy retail designers who possess no conscience had me wandering the aisles in a hypnotic daze for the next half hour.

You know how it is. To get at an item of your choice, you have to first pass by a stream of other shiny happy products that all scream at you from the shelves, pleading to be picked up and folded into your bosom like a mob of hungry babies. By the time I emerged from Thom's into the light of cold day, my head was spinning, my bank manager had suffered a myocardial infarction, and my arms were creaking with two large bags packed with aromatic phenyl, dish-rags, marshmallows, green tea, deodorant, flavoured yoghurt, orange juice, a couple of magazines, beer, honey-roasted peanuts, shaving razors, shampoo and a packet of MTR pongal. It was only when I reached home that I realized that I'd forgotten to buy the pesticide. (“The look on his face when he unpacks his bags and finds out he's a f***wit – priceless.”) A field day for Mastercard, cockroaches for me.

What we may infer from this, aside from the shuddersome image of me being chewed up by thousands of indestructible arthropods, is this: the more choice we have and the more information that's thrown at us, the more effort and time we are forced to consume in evaluating our options, and thereby the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with the outcome. People who study such things call the phenomenon 'choice fatigue'. They say that the leading cause of unhappiness in successful market economies, such as that of the USA and increasingly our own as well, is an over-abundance of choice. We adapt to this proliferating choice by picking things haphazardly and acquiring far more than we need. And the more we own, the more we get used to all the stuff surrounding us, and the less special our lifestyles feel to us. Is it any surprise, then, that highly consumerist, advanced societies feature at a remarkably low rank in world happiness indices?

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While it's obvious that we often consume far more than we require, it's also worth assessing some of the wider-reaching – and subtler – effects of our fervid consumption. The first step to sustainable living is to understand the patterns in which people and societies interact, in figuring out the simple logic behind complex mechanisms. The objects we use and the objects that use us have their origins in a mind-boggling array of locations, and they are transported to us daily at a massive cost to the earth's resources.

Regard your morning cup of tea, for instance. Let's zoom in a little further, onto that nice Earl Grey teabag. That bag that consists of flavoured tea leaves wrapped in a special paper composed of fibres that are engineered to facilitate superior osmosis, while making sure that the paper doesn't tear from exposure to hot water. That bag that is held together by a staple pin and suspended from a little piece of printed cardboard by a string. Each of these components was likely sourced from a different part of the world. The tea leaves inside the bag are probably a blend of Darjeeling tea, Ceylon tea and a hint of Lapsang Souchong that was sourced from a mountain in the Fujian Province of China and processed in a Xingjian Province sweatshop. These tea-leaves are flavoured, in turn, with a citric oil extracted from the Bergamot orange that's produced in the south of Italy. The paper in the teabag is made of bleached, pulped abaca hemp from the Philippines or Columbia, and the staple pin that secures it is from the USA. The cotton string, it is possible, was bought by British traders from a corporation in Mozambique that in turn purchased heavily subsidized American cotton through a dubious middleman with links to organized crime. The card flap in your bag of tea was probably made in Ludhiana and printed in Hyderabad using French inks in a Japanese offset printer.

But that's not all.

The teabags were most likely shipped to India from England in standard-sized 8ft tall by 40ft long metal boxes on 350m long Panamax cargo vessels that can each carry 6,600 such metal boxes and are major contributors to air and water pollution, oil-spills and toxic ship-breaking.

Of course, all that comes only with your monthly supply of Her Majesty's favourite Earl Grey tea. Maybe there are other teas from other brands that aren't quite as catastrophic in their environmental impact. The lesson here is not that you should now become paranoid and freak out over the slightest detail of your existence. The idea is to be aware of the fact that the world is far more integrated than you might've earlier thought possible (god knows, the recession taught us that little lesson resoundingly enough). Going Swadeshi isn't about knee-jerk xenophobia. Going Swadeshi is about global thinking. It's an easily ignored fact that Gandhi was first a lawyer, then a wily politician, and only then a nationalist symbol. The stuff he said isn't merely the byproduce of fortune cookies.

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Speaking of good old MKG. Every October, as always, the media and the government's lumbering PR department waggle their collective index fingers at you with that blithe Gandhian admonishment that you must “be the change that you want to see.” That sounds like a right pile of biscuits, but how does this cliché quotation translate in terms of practical, everyday application?

John Thackera, the Founder and Director of Doors of Perception, a company that interfaces between designers and grassroots innovators internationally, expands on the Mahatma's deceptively simple aphorism thus: “The imaginary, an alternative cultural vision, is vital in shaping expectations and driving transformational change. Shared visions act as forces of innovation, and what designers can do – what we all can do – is imagine some situation or condition that does not yet exist but describe it in sufficient detail that it appears to be a desirable new version of the real world.” Shared visions act as forces of innovation. Now there's a winning ticket. Thackera's point, I'm sure you'll sympathize, is summat shy of the kind of wide-eyed Lennon-ish poetry essential to sufficiently inspirational messages, but what it lacks in vague-ass preachiness, it makes up for with insight and pragmatism. Thackera advocates idealism with a backbone, a sort of structured pottiness, the very engine of creation.

We all have the ability to mentally conjure up ideal alternate worlds – the very fact that we complain so much about the one we currently inhabit ably demonstrates the vitality of our imaginations – but do we have the right tools to describe these worlds with the detail required to effect a lasting and efficient transition to them? Are these other worlds truly going to be fitter, happier and more productive than this one? You're not too sure? Well, I'm not either. So let's you and I use this space to discuss the possibilities.

Hullo, then, and welcome to 'See Change', a blog on design and sustainability for the real worl... no, no, three times no, strike that. Wayyy boring. I can already hear the hollow crannies of the internet exploding with the thunder of a million browser tabs being hastily closed all at once. Okay, here goes once again. Welcome to 'See Change', a blog on pattern recognition and identifying nodes of... er... ah, screw it. Too pseudo. Not happening. Right, let's start over, one last time.

Hey hey hey howdy ho! – you intelligent, beautiful, sexy potential-commenter, you! – and welcome to 'See Change': a blog about figuring out what we really need, and about cutting loose all the shit that we can bloody well do without. Amen.