Design Education for a Sustainable Future
For the last edition of What Design Can Do, we hosted a workshop on Designing for a Sustainable Future. Together with TU Delft and Design Academy Eindhoven, Digital Society School designed a workshop with the goal to find out how to effectively incorporate the Global Goals for Sustainable Development in design education, and how to educate for a sustainable future.
What knowledge, expertise and skills do designers need to develop in order to be able to address the UN SDGs? And what role do educational institutions, but also the industry play in this?
Fighting design waste
First of all, we did not want to host this as one school — as goal 17 also shows; partnerships for the goals are just as important as the goals themselves.
Another reason strengthening a collaborative and co-creative approach, also together with the audience in the room, was that within Digital Society School and Global Goals Jam, one of our main activities specifically on and for the global goals, we try to engage communities in “fighting design waste”: a mission to install a culture of sharing and building upon each others work. Within the design community, there is the tendency to show final projects and products, but not necessarily the preceding process.
It’s not easy either; creative projects are messy, sometimes ugly, and not easy to share — and it might be even harder to use unfinished input for new ideas. However, there might be a lot of valuable ideas that go to waste.
Hopefully, through this article, we can share some of those ideas — in order to spark some new ones and create future partnerships.
Turning the goals into action
For the first part, we dove into the Global Goals. Since their birth in 2012, the Global Goals have slowly become more present not only within government and private industry, but also within creative fields. However, they are big goals, and there are 17 of them. To be able to work with them hands on within a design context is quite the challenge. A nice challenge for our audience, we thought.
So we asked them:
1. what do we need to work with the global goals? How do we turn these goals into action?
📍The goals need context. They need to be related to real world issues, that are relevant to local communities and to real people. Only when showing concrete and current challenges, people will start to engage with them on a personal level.
Scaling 📈: make the goals smaller and practical, break them down, and be specific. A goal such as Sustainable Cities and Communities is still quite big and broad (not to mention No poverty or Zero Hunger), but a goal such as increase the amount of green spaces on rooftops in Amsterdam East already becomes much more relatable.
“create small-scale solutions and upscale them”
🤝 Multidisciplinarity : there are 17 goals, related to wide ranging topics such as health, energy, and gender equality. To act on the goals and tackle its related challenges, we need to involve different skillsets from different disciplines. We also need to connect and collaborate “between academia, private sector, government”.
📢 Communication: this approach also means that we need to share across disciplines; and tell each other of practical examples that exist, share best practices, and in doing so create awareness on what and why the goals are, and how we can deal with them in an effective way.
A final point was about the step after engaging with and communicating about the goals; how do we measure and monitor 👀 success and impact?
So we found out some answers — but as often is the case, also a lot of more questions, mostly related to how to solve the points above. How do we make sure to involve different stakeholders? How do we share the best practices that exist, and measure impact of those best practices?
Educating for the future
As we had a lot of educators in the room, we took a swing at our own community: education.
Because, when looking back at the needs for transforming the goals into actions, does it make sense what — and more importantly who — we are educating?
2. What makes a future proof designer? What are the key competences?
To create a framework where to collect possible answers, we quickly drew up a blank canvas of “a transformation designer”, with 4 different areas to think about: his/her personal life, professional life, needs and pains.
Soon enough we realised that we better could have added a question mark to our definition of a future-proof designer, as both terms (transformation designer as well as future-proof) were instantly criticised — which was great. Also, the strict division between personal and professional life was challenged by some groups in the room. However, when all groups shared their profile at the end, there were also commonalities shared among them.
First of all, there seems to be a need for designers that are able to think and work beyond their own field or specialty. Challenges of today’s world apply to many different fields of expertise, and thus need to involve many different stakeholders with different background. This requires a systemic approach, or as some called it a holistic mindset, answering to the earlier mentioned multidisciplinarity also present within the goals.
In general, the audience asked for a designer that knows how to balance different things. Being a collaborative team player versus having your own individual specialty, as well as knowing how to navigate the demands of the external world but at the same time having a sense of self reflection. A lot of groups stressed an analytical, or research driven approach, while at the same time there was also a call for makers and tinkerers.
And then there were general skills related to personal leadership: empathy, persistence, a strong belief in creating impact and the ability to achieve something, and related to that an ethical foundation: to design with a vision, to take a position, and to also know what is happening on the level of policy and politics.
Interestingly enough, within this (ambitious much🔮?) wish list, there was almost no mention of technological, or more hard skills in general. I am not sure if this is because this is already happening, if the world changes so fast that these competences will change anyway or if maybe the lack of the aforementioned designer’s attitude and mindset is a more pressing challenge?
3. What is already happening, and what do we still need?
The last question (or actually last 2 questions) we asked was (in a good sustainable mindset☝): what is already out there? Before we start creating new things, let’s first have a look around us to see what is there that we can use?
At that moment it became very clear that there is a lot happening, so more than creating new things we need to coordinate and communicate about existing initiatives. Again, we are back at the issue of sharing and building upon each others work, it seems. Although the SDGs provide a clear framework where people can relate their business, organisation or event to — there is a danger of different isolated islands doing their own thing without painting the systemic or holistic picture that is needed to tackle the wicked problems that the Goals address.
Again, then the question remains: HOW?
The workshop showed us that there is a lot of energy and urgency to act upon the goals, through design, education and other disciplines. To do this, we need a common language, that brings all different stakeholders together in the first place.
An example of a cooperation and community on a global level, is the Global Goals Jam, a collaboration that Digital Society School has with United Nations Development Programme since 2016 — where multidisciplinary teams from all over the world come together to design interventions for the Global Goals using a shared toolkit, always taking place in the weekend before Climate Week in September. It is a very tangible, short term event that invites industry professionals, educators, creatives as well as sustainability experts, all working together towards a similar goal for 2 days. With the growing learning community of the Digital Society School, we are now working to integrate the Jam into our longer term programmes, where it serves as an intensive kick-off leading towards more sustainable partnerships and projects on design for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Of course, there are many other possible examples. Looking at our learnings from the Jam and our other cross-cultural projects, as well as the learnings from the workshop at What Design Can Do, there are a couple of important design criteria to keep in mind:
adaptability: whatever form this “common language” takes (a workshop, a meetup series, shared educational content or other); there should be room for adaptation to the local context and community — to enable relevance, scalability, and further development.
co-creation: content and form should not only be fitting for different stakeholders; ideally it is created together with them. The creation itself could even be the first motivation to get different parties at the same table.
sustainable use of material and resources: we sometimes forget how much is already out there — it is valuable to look at connection over creation.
open and transparent: not only outcome, but also process should be shared and communicated. This ensures a culture of contribution, feedback, and change when needed.
As this is an ongoing process, of which this workshop was just the first initiative, we would love to continue the conversation and activities together with you. Do you have ideas, existing content or activities that could help? Please don’t hesitate to reach out. 💌
We also very warmly welcome you to join a Global Goals Jam (see www.globalgoalsjam.org for a location near you) and help us move forward from questions to answers to actions!🙌🌍
