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Sustainability: New Insights for Education. Kathleen Kevany, Donald Huisingh and Francisco J. Lozano García
Design and education for sustainability
One of the emerging questions of the Design and System Innovation for Sustainability (DIS) Research Unit (Politecnico di Milano) is, "What is the potential for design educators to contribute to the development of sustainable socio-technical systemic ideas and concepts?".
This question was explored within the faculty of design through an experimental approach to education, by introducing into the curricula, a special education format for advanced research issues, i.e. a design exercise on "Sustainable products-service systems (PSS) design for all." This issue is a world-wide, new front of the research, in which the PSS is proposed as a promising "lighter" path towards sustainable development in both industrialized and emerging contexts.
A complementary and inevitable need to follow this experimental education approach has been the creation of the relationships among researchers and professors from these contexts, in order to lay the foundation for a multilateral learning process and knowledge exchange. These relationships have led to the birth of an informal international network, named DECOS, which stands for campus network on Design in Emerging COntexts for Sustainability.
This paper addresses one of the possible facets of this multilateral learning process, an aspect (among many others) related to the role of university education in the design disciplines.
The results, either as outputs of the educational design exercise, or as further knowledge exchange, is presented and discussed.
Addressing sustainability within emerging contexts
As a research unit for the design and system innovation for sustainability in a design faculty, we consider it a crucial issue to understand how we can contribute to the development of sustainable ideas for emerging contexts throughout the design research and education. The term context is used in this paper instead of countries to remind all of us that developed countries have underdeveloped contexts and vice versa.
An important question to be addressed is why we should address part of the research attention and efforts on emerging contexts when at present the environmental problems are related to the industrialized ones, and when we know that 20 percent of the industrialized world population consumes 80 percent of global resources. Would it not be more sensible to focus on the...