Sustainability is rapidly becoming an issue of critical importance for designers and society as a whole. A complexity of dynamically interrelated ecological, social, cultural, economic, and psychologi- cal (awareness) problems interact and converge in the current crisis of our unsustainable civilization. However, in a constantly chang- ing environment, sustainability is not some ultimate endpoint, but instead is a continuous process of learning and adaptation. Designing for sustainability not only requires the redesign of our habits, lifestyles, and practices, but also the way we think about design. Sustainability is a process of coevolution and co-design that involves diverse communities in making flexible and adaptable design decisions on local, regional, and global scales. The transition towards sustainability is about co-creating a human civilization that flourishes within the ecological limits of the planetary life support system. Design is fundamental to all human activity. At the nexus of values, attitudes, needs, and actions, designers have the potential to act as transdisciplinary integrators and facilitators. The map of value systems and perspectives described by Beck and Cowan 1 as “Spiral Dynamics” can serve as a tool in facilitating “transdisciplinary design dialogue.” Such dialogue will help to integrate multiple perspectives and the diverse knowledge base of different disciplines, value systems, and stakeholders. ... ((( Co-Author: Prof Seaton Baxter; University of Dundee and Schumacher College, not yet on academia.edu )))

The present paper intends to present the early stage on a bigger attempt to discuss design education and its role in a paradigm shift moment, pointing the need to change how designers think and learn to face wicked problems in a more complex society. New active methodologies will be considered in order to promote a teaching-learning process that reinforces the construction of new competencies, which increases students' perception of the reality that surrounds them and makes them evident the impact of design processes and solutions. This conceptual broadening will make them more socially responsible agents, aware of the importance of their civic action and active role towards innovation, social wellbeing, and Sustainability.

Global communities are faced with escalating challenges of climate change, resource depletion, increasing waste, urban decay, population fluctuations and displacement of the geographically, politically and economically disadvantaged. Within this context, it is time to re-think the circumscribed boundaries of current design practice, re-directing the agenda of design to explore a cross-disciplinary approach to the increasing levels of risk in the built environment, to ensure sustainable long-term futures. This paper will provide an account of a current initiative in “pedagogical praxis” (Shaffer 2004) called LiveSpace, a studio for Socially and Environmentally Responsible Design based at Griffith University. Using as a case study a project developed in Charleville, Western Queensland the paper demonstrates a means of addressing expanding complex regional issues through an authentic cross-disciplinary approach to design education and design thinking. By creating an “experimental learning environment” (Shaffer 2004), LiveSpace aims to prepare graduates for future work practices, as well as establishing a framework for inventing new participatory approaches in collaboration with communities, local government, businesses and not for profit groups.

This paper explores the complexity of engaging undergraduate student designers with sustainability in the master and apprentice model of the design studio. There is a growing call for design practice to reorientate towards a more sustainable form and it is suggested that design educators have a responsibility in driving this shift. A four-year action research project enquired as to why undergraduate industrial design students could not Design for Sustainability (DfS). Interventions were identified and implemented to address this concern. These were: (1.) increasing students’ understanding of unsustainability and its relational complexity, and (2.) improving student engagement by focusing on the pedagogy of deep learning. Deep learning almost mirrors the problem based learning model of the design studio. However in practice, realising deep learning as the desired pedagogy required critical reflection from the educator to introduce a student centred approach to teaching. The paper then locates these findings amongst broader educational and industrial design education for sustainability literature. This exposes the juxtaposition of the studio as a place where the teacher-as-researcher can actively integrate progressive DfS concepts, however, leaves the studio susceptible to the troubling question of what happens when the master does not know?

This paper describes the methodology of a workshop done with design students during the Design Week of Mérida, at Universidad de Extremadura – Spain. The activity was based on the premise that – due to the growing complexity of the challenges faced by society today – designers need to act as part of the solution being agents of change. The workshop discussed the skills, methods, and partnerships for design to achieve such a change on its approach and how Design Education plays a part in preparing the future generation of designers to tackle social innovation and sustainability problems. The results showed how the students understand the future of design and the possibilities for improvement in a system that struggles to be resilient and respond at a faster pace.

The relationship between design and sustainability (DfS) is forever evolving: from the early focus on cleaner production processes and resource efficiencies to more recent endeavours to promote environmentally benign behaviours or to counter the increasing impacts of climate change. The uncomfortable truth though is that the majority of design activity serves market forces at a global scale and at an ever-increasing rate. Despite predictions of resource scarcity – peak oil, peak minerals, peak water – the increase in the linear transit of material through the Global economy rises year on year. Design straddles this production consumption cycle: it conceives of the processes and technologies that shape our artificial world; and it fashions the forms of that artificial world that drive a consumption ideology. Neither position is sustainable. Informed by Sterling’s rigorous exploration of different sustainable education paradigms, this paper reconstructs a design literacy that has the ...

In the design community, as in other disciplines, the environmental crisis has been misjudged and insufficiently addressed for decades. But as the scale of the crisis grows, so too do insights and creativity regarding how the problems of climate change can be addressed, be it using the methods and forms of expression of design or through interdisciplinary exchange. Especially for students at art and design universities, preparing for an unknown future entails the duty, but also the freedom, to experiment in a safe space and to envision a possible and desirable transformation towards sustainability.