Core77
- Topics
- Features
-
Awards
- Awards
- 2022 Design Awards Results;
- Jobs
-
Firms
- Firms
- Search Firms;
- Firm Projects
- Forums
-
More...
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Advertise
- About
- Terms of Use
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability: The RCA's Approach, by Clare Brass and Octavia Reeve
It's fantastic that eco-design and life cycle analysis etc are gaining momentum in design. Also it is great to see many educators like yourselves committed to sustainability. But I think we are mistakenly focused on "lowest environmental impact". This effectively puts blinkers on us (like horse blinkers) and leads us to focus on Eco Design-type strategies in our pursuit of sustainability.
Eco-design is all about minimising impact. It is an admission of the failure of economic theory/ economic growth, and it is an attempt to patch this failure. Eco-design is not about fundamentally changing the way we do things. Eco-design is not about creating sustainability. It is about reducing unsustainability.
I'm glad you don't teach "Sustainable Design" because design cannot be sustainable. 'Sustainable anything' is not achievable as everything and every form of energy eventually degrades heat (law of thermodynamics). At best, design can only help create, as John Ehrenfeld points out, the "possibility of sustainability".
"They [your students] are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognise patterns of behaviour that point to a universal human need."
You raise two fundamental issues in your post (quoted above). I believe however, that this approach will undermine your intentions. Designing to meet existing behavioural patterns and trends simply reinforces unsustainable norms - unless an underlying structural change is created. And do you know what you mean by "need"?
In better understanding need, want and authentic satisfaction I recommend Ehrenfeld, J. R. 2008, Sustainability by Design: A subversive strategy for transforming our consumer culture, Yale University Press, USA.
With the blinkers on, and focused on environmental impact, we perhaps overlook a more critical element that 'stands between us' and the environment - the social aspect and how we may design to help people discover sustainability for themselves. After all, we can't just "be told".
We need eco-design but let's please recognise it for what it is.
If you disagree or I misinterpreted your post, please let me know.
Thank you
Beta or Obsolete is the overiding system that controls the main economic driver of the carreers for "designers" today and for any foreseeable "proven" future.
Yes, there are only 2 paying industries left for a "western world designer" either make virtual products or clean up the mess left by the past overselling of real ones.;)
As to students...Choose one.. and then you choose the "weight" of sustainablity youll carry as you look to pay rent and buy food.:)
Thats of course only IF you havent already decided that you didnt take out all those stident loans, just not to get a paying gig in design to repay them;)
younger designers..choose.
If someone had come up with that theories 200 years ago we would be still in industrial age probably.
A big polluting Industry and the resources it make available might be a driver of an unpolluting(or less polluting) process, tools, materials. We just don't know.
We also don't know what are the reserves of natural materials because they are dependent of the cost to extract them and the cost to extract them depends on technology. What will be the technology in 2025? What will its cost?
For now there is only one thing sure. This are worries of rich people.