Sustainable Design: Postcards for Learning Delivered

Abstract

Universities embrace the principles of sustainability, but often the enthusiasm for supporting the teaching of sustainability lags behind the willingness to embrace at a facilities level (Christie et al., 2013). Sustainability education is strongest in the environmental sciences (Cortese & Hattan, 2010) although the pedagogy of design is recognized as having high potential for meaningful sustainability education (Geitz & de Geus, 2019; Seatter & Ceulemans, 2017). Support for educators, in terms of time, resources allocation and organization, are all critical for sustainability education to succeed (Christie et al., 2013). This study finds that undergraduate students in the design and related disciplines care about the idea of sustainability but lack a clear understanding of what Sustainable Design could entail. Instructors also recognize the importance of their students learning sustainability principles but are forced to rely heavily on their personal knowledge of the concepts, with varying levels of proficiency and confidence in this knowledge. The design and creation of a toolset, in the form of a box of cards with prompts for sustainability related learning activities on them, was tested to determine if such a toolset could positively impact student understanding of Sustainable Design. Post-test surveys suggested that the instructors were enthusiastic about the potential for a usable toolset for introducing Sustainable Design to their students. For students using the tools, the post-test survey responses suggest they gained fluency in the concept of Sustainable Design with stronger definitions of sustainability post-test than pretest. They also expressed increased confidence in their ability to apply Sustainable Design principles to their own work as Industrial Designers.