Sustainable Design Education in Higher Education and Implementation

This Special Issue sets out to further the ongoing discourse around the need for changes in design education [1,2,3]. Not only are the contexts in which designers work becoming increasingly complex but the roles they are taking up are increasingly diverse. In addition, there is a need to adequately prepare students to use their skills to contribute to addressing the global challenges we see around us (poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice) [4] and to empower them to recognise the potential that they hold to improve the status quo. Authors were invited to submit approaches to sustainable design education and implementation in Higher Education (HE) from multiple perspectives, focusing on what and how designers learn. Contributions which provide commentary on novel, visionary and progressive sustainable design pedagogies, and the implications they have on formal education systems as well as outside of formal settings, were sought. Despite ongoing constraints arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing world-wide economic challenges, the Special Issue presents nine papers, covering both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of education from the UK, Portugal, Sweden, the USA, Taiwan, China and Russia.

The need to raise the sustainability literacy of designers to engage with emerging complexities was a key topic addressed within this Special Issue. Authors outline different perspectives on sustainability literacy and how it can inform design education. For some, this means learning how to incorporate sustainability principles or strategies into one’s own design practice. These tend to be domain specific, following a pre-defined pathway linked to an output; for example, the paper by Nazlı Terzioğlu and Renee Wever (Contribution 1) discusses designing for repair, and the paper by Steven Whitehill, Carolyn S. Hayles, Sean Jenkins and Jim Taylour (Contribution 2) discusses design for circularity. A few authors argue for the need to supplement design literacy with social and ecological literacies, advocating for the transdisciplinary approaches to education that promote criticality and reflexivity. Depending on the discipline, this may involve introducing more technical and scientific knowledge, such as an eco-engineering theory proposed by Jianqing Ma and Huixia Jin (Contribution 3), or socio-cultural topics of decoloniality, justice and pluralism discussed in the papers of Alexandra Raeva, Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk, Anton Raev, Irina Surina and Marina Fionova (Contribution 4); Paul Micklethwaite (Contribution 5); and Joanna Boehnert, Matt Sinclair and Emma Dewberry (Contribution 6).

The papers also discuss how sustainability literacy is taught, broadly agreeing that project-based learning is the cornerstone for sustainable design education, citing many benefits, including promoting real-life learning, engaging in change, undertaking impact-driven activities and understanding complexity. The papers reflect multiple formats that project-based learning can take. For example, Paul Micklethwaite (Contribution 5) proposes open-ended, place-based briefs with local communities where students lead the design process, exploring solutions for sustainable living through the critical exploration of their pre-existing knowledge. The paper by Jianqing Ma and Huixia Jin (Contribution 3) reports on research-informed, project-based learning, with a constrained brief which encourages students to explore the topic in more depth. Xin Cao, Yen Hsu and Honglei Lu (Contribution 7) explore the provision of direct reference points and propose a Heuristic tool to move beyond the need for tacit information.

Several authors reflect on how the knowledge that students enter HE with is an important point of departure from which teaching strategies can be developed and implemented. From a transdisciplinary perspective, the papers by Julie Milovanovic, Tripp Shealy and Andrew Katz (Contribution 8) and by Jianqing Ma and Huixia Jin (Contribution 3) recognise the value of design literacy and explore how it can be supplemented with content from other disciplines. On the other hand, the papers by Alexandra Raeva, Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk, Anton Raev, Irina Surina and Marina Fionova (Contribution 4) and Paul Micklethwaite (Contribution 5) draw on students’ prior knowledge of unsustainable ways of doing and thinking about design, and its impact in the world. They cite this as an important resource for developing student’s agency to engage in critical inquiry, untangle and question what one knows, then re-frame and create new desirable futures, demonstrating that such knowledge is effective in propelling sustainable education.

The papers in this Special Issue, including that by Ana F. Curralo, Sérgio I. Lopes, João Mendes and Antonio Curado (Contribution 9), illustrate that typically within collaborative approaches to learning, design students tend to enter the relationship as experts, who perfect their design knowledge and skill whilst working with an organisation or a community on a brief, exploring sustainable solutions. For Alexandra Raeva, Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk, Anton Raev, Irina Surina and Marina Fionova (Contribution 4), however, it is the local, semi-autonomous rural communities of DIY makers and tinkerers, found across Russia, where true expertise in sustainable living can be found. Drawing on theories of pluralism, the authors illustrate how these communities can become sites for learning in non-exploitative, non-extractive ways.

The papers also evidence the continued emotional and cognitive labour that design educators invest to develop innovative teaching practices in response to societal and environmental needs. These practices are informed by insights from design researchers working in the field, as well as communities of praxis outside of design. Joanna Boehnert, Matt Sinclair and Emma Dewberry (Contribution 6) reveal the difficulty of implementing these changes at a large scale in the UK HE sector which is averse to disruption and radical change. They argue that this not only undermines the work of singular educators-activists but whole research communities and further contributes to the reproduction of unsustainable design practices that so many are calling to change.

Here, we share our final observations on the insights generated through the Special Issue and highlight key areas for future research and practice in sustainable design education and implementation.

First, we observe how sustainable design education emerges from the intersection of sustainability and design literacies. It showcases a plurality of definitions, methods and approaches that aim to integrate, reflect and in some places lead on sustainable design discourses alongside academia and industry. We see this as something that will continue to develop as: the students of tomorrow enter HE with an increased level of socio-cultural and environmental awareness; and disciplinary boundaries merge in response to transdisciplinary challenges and alternative ways of knowing and doing become more evident. The Special Issue also highlights that real-life projects continue to be imperative for students’ learning, yet we observe that where projects are done with an external partner, there is less opportunity for students to have a first-hand experience of the impact of their design process. This continues to replicate the gap between design process and implementation, resulting in an incomplete student learning experience. At the same time, we see universities as emerging sites for sustainable pedagogical interventions and welcome it as a way of students experiencing first-hand what it is to be involved in change and the potential this has for enhanced learning. It also opens opportunities for a visible output for more innovative teaching practices, co-existing and in dialogue with more traditional outputs, that we hope can serve as leverage to organisational and institutional change.

Finally, we reflect that papers place emphasis on what students need ‘to know’ and be able ‘to do’ to achieve sustainability literacy, and only marginally on what students ‘are becoming’ [5]. We believe that it is imperative to pay more attention to students’ personal transformation in HE both in future research and practice. This is particularly important as designers of tomorrow will likely be tasked to actively lead transitions towards more sustainable and just futures. Asking not only what students know, but also what they have become, as they transition from HE, facilitates opportunities to explicitly develop pedagogies that support self-empowerment, reflexivity and leadership for navigating complex and difficult systems.

List of Contributions:

• Terzioğlu, N.; Wever, R. Integrating Repair into Product Design Education: Insights on Repair, Design and Sustainability.
• Whitehill, S.; Hayles, C.S.; Jenkins, S.; Taylour, J. Engagement with Higher Education Surface Pattern Design Students as a Catalyst for Circular Economy Action.
• Ma, J.; Jin, H. Increasing Sustainability Literacy for Environmental Design Students: A Transdisciplinary Learning Practice.
• Raeva, A.; Usenyuk-Kravchuk, S.; Raev, A.; Surina, I.; Fionova, M. Augmenting Design Education for Sustainability through Field Exploration: An Experience of Learning from DIY Practices in a Rural Community.
• Micklethwaite, P. Sustainable Design Masters: Increasing the Sustainability Literacy of Designers.
• Boehnert, J.; Sinclair, M.; Dewberry, E. Sustainable and Responsible Design Education: Tensions in Transitions.
• Cao, X.; Hsu, Y.; Lu, H. CBDHS: A Case-Based Design Heuristics Tool to Support Product Design Students in Idea Generation.
• Milovanovic, J.; Shealy, T.; Katz, A. Higher Perceived Design Thinking Traits and Active Learning in Design Courses Motivate Engineering Students to Tackle Energy Sustainability in Their Careers.
• Curralo, A.F.; Lopes, S.I.; Mendes, J.; Curado, A. Joining Sustainable Design and Internet of Things Technologies on Campus: The IPVC Smartbottle Practical Case.