ARE WE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS? Rethinking Post-Graduate Design Education Towards Sustainable Visions for the Future

Clare Brass & Francesco Mazzarella E&PDE ‘15, Loughborough, 03/09/15

A GREAT DISRUPTION

Complex Sustainability Challenges

Great Expectations?

New Drivers for Design

ARE WE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

?

A New Ecology of Design Culture

Rawles, 2010

SustainRCA, 2013

Chicken-centred design for welfare poultry industry

CHICKEN RUN

EDUCATING THE “O-SHAPED” DESIGNER

Brass, 2015

DISCLOSED

Ferrec and Wakely, 2014

Transparency certification system providing customised shopping information

Mazzarella and Engler, 2014

Bennett, 2014

CORAL3

Social enterprise with multiple stakeholders using 3D printing to tackle ocean acidification

Yee et al., 2008

Designer’s Roles

•  Deeply understanding a project’s economic, social and environmental drivers, that consider viability, sustainability and scalability.

•  Nurturing entrepreneurial skill sets to ensure entire design process challenges current economic models.

•  Pitching ideas through mapping and systematic visualisation of the implications of all design decisions.

•  Managing innovation through new tools (open data, data visualisation, PSS, PD, scenario prototyping...).

EXAMPLES OF BEST PRACTICE FROM SUSTAINRCA

SustainRCA Show & Awards, 2014

SustainRCA supports students across the College to address sustainability challenges

in innovative and entrepreneurial ways

Embedding sustainability as core learning objective and holistic assessment criterion

Sustainability Workflow

OOHO!

Open source, DIY, Cradle2Cradle, biomimetic water “packaging”

Couche, Garcia Gonzalez and Paslier, 2014

•  Blurred boundaries of the design discipline. •  Great expectations for design to respond to new challenges. •  Growing student awareness of social and environmental issues. •  Increasing interest from new stakeholders in the design process. •  Emerging design practice outstripping research capacity.

•  Building cross-disciplinary collaborations towards a rigorous research agenda.

•  Triggering design-led biocentrism. •  Exploring solutions to wicked problems through new tools, assessed according to sustainability criteria. •  Asking the right questions to drive creation of a sustainable future.

Challenges

Opportunities

Clare Brass & Francesco Mazzarella

THANK YOU

clare.brass@rca.ac.uk f.mazzarella@lboro.ac.uk