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Introduction
Design activity has been changing due to issues related to sustainability, globalization, digital age and new value systems, and its complexity is increasing (Dorst, 2008). Industrial designers, today, are designing not only products but also services and socio-economic artifacts (Roozenburg, 2014). These changes require extending the scope of design education as well. However, integrating sustainability into both design activity and design education is a challenge, even if specific courses already address this issue (Boks and Diehl, 2006).
This study investigates integrating sustainability into project-based design courses, by focusing on two sustainable design innovation levels, product and product-service system levels. Two workshops were carried out at the Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Product Design (ITU-IPD) in Turkey. In Turkey, incentives allocated to sustainable design in undergraduate design education are inadequate and there is the need for specialization programmes on sustainable design (Erkarslan, 2013).
Ideally, sustainability should be addressed in early semesters of design education and be interwoven into the curriculum (Gürel, 2010). At the ITU-IPD, sustainable design has been introduced in several courses such as ‘Introduction to Industrial Product Design and Ethics’. A specific course on sustainable design was not offered, but was in the development stage, while this study was being carried out. The study aimed to contribute to the development of the new course curriculum.
Background
The background will focus on three subjects: design process models, sustainable design approaches and sustainable design in industrial design education.
The design process models
The process of learning in design is investigated as a “reflective practice, a reflective conversation with the situation” (Schön, 1983). The core of the design education is the design studio courses, which emerged in Bauhaus School of Design in Germany. In design studios, students design a project under the supervision of the instructors, who are also called “coaches”. Supervision consists of meetings and conversations with the students about their sketches, including reviews and critiques with verbal and visual dimensions. At the end of the semesters, the students present their design outcomes and design processes to a “jury” of coaches, which might include experts or stakeholders, as well as peers (Schön, 1983; Brandt et al., 2013).
In design studio courses, the pedagogical approach is usually project-based learning (Lee, 2009; Brandt et al.