EPDE15_Brass&Mazzarella_Final_Paper.pdf (300.07 kB)
Are we asking the right questions? Rethinking post-graduate design education towards sustainable visions for the future
conference contribution
posted on 2015-10-07, 11:11 authored by Clare Brass, Francesco MazzarellaOur society is currently facing complex challenges, such us climate change, loss of biodiversity,
ageing population, unemployment, to name but a few. This has created growing expectations on
designers and engineers to explore, experiment and implement innovative solutions to such issues. At
this critical time, if we want design to be part of the solution, we need to wonder whether we are
asking designers suitable and sustainable questions. Both in post-graduate design education and in
business, the brief still overwhelmingly requires designers to follow a linear problem-solving approach
that focuses on product rather than strategies, services and systems. Traditional design briefs result no
longer appropriate to face the challenges of our unsustainable world, as they relate to market, growth
economy and human needs rather than society, business models and the needs of nature. Instead, we
need to be asking questions about, for example, how we create sustainable business opportunities, how
we overcome the barriers for change, or how we facilitate the process of innovation through design
methodology. If the role of design is to create new visions and outline strategic directions towards a
sustainable future world - for policy makers, businesses, communities and individual citizens – we
need those stakeholders to create briefs for designers that allow them to do that. This paper will
explain how the reframing of questions has been embedded into SustainRCA’s teaching practice in
post-graduate design, art and engineering, leading to the development of new tools and methods, as
well as some innovative outcomes.
History
School
- Design
Published in
E&PDE 2015: Great Expectations: Design Teaching, Research & EnterpriseCitation
BRASS, C. and MAZZARELLA, F., 2015. Are we asking the right questions? Rethinking post-graduate design education towards sustainable visions for the future. IN: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, E&PDE 2015: Great Expectations: Design Teaching, Research & Enterprise, University of Loughborough, UK 3-4 September 2015.Publisher
Design Society and the Institution of Engineering DesignersVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This is a conference paper. It was presented at: http://www.iepde.org/epde15/Language
- en