Building Views on Sustainable Development in Innovation and Design Education.

Merel Claes Harbin Engineering University

23 September 2010

merelclaes@gmail.com

Background…

The educational system aims to prepare (young) people how to cope with potential problems and how to influence their future.

Sustainable development covers the activities to counteract the problems facing everyone’s quality of life…

However, people who most influence un-sustainability are the professionals who graduated from higher education. (Orr, 2001)

…Questions…

1: Is there something wrong with the worldviews of higher education?

2: Do graduates lack vision?

…Clarifications…

Worldviews on Sustainability

(Claes, 2009)

Visions on Sustainable Development

(Hopwood et al, 2005)

Sustainability issues are complex and cannot be understood in isolation.

What is your discipline?

(Claes, 2009)

Inter-disciplinarity is a collaboration process beyond the traditional boundaries to solve a question.

Multi-disciplinarity does not consider relatedness of disciplines.

Trans-disciplinarity has a question that reaches across disciplines.

1: Is there something wrong with the worldviews of higher education?

2: Do graduates lack vision?

3: If we want a different world, do we need to design or to innovate?

Innovations are ideas that are further developed on a meaningful scale.

Design is the link between technology and humans.

1: Is there something wrong with the worldviews of higher education?

2: Do graduates lack vision?

3: If we want a different world, do we need to design or to innovate?

4: How can innovation and design work on sustainable development?

5: How can education contribute?

…Discussion.

a shared vision provides the learning organization with focus and energy…

(Hopwood et al, 2005)

…correlations between educational discipline and the shared vision…

…graduates settling into inter-disciplinary and learning organizations for sustainable solutions…

…misunderstandings, different levels of ambition, frustrations, stress…delays in innovation

Designers are often the only ones who can speak all the jargon. (Papanek, 1985)

Diversity offers a huge opportunity for sharing and creation of knowledge, but create challenges of creating a common understanding. (Fisher, 2005)

Education should teach future designers the Perry scheme

…?...

Are design courses the cornerstone for higher education to become change agents in sustainable development?

Thank you

merelclaes@gmail.com