Open AccessArticle

Toward Sustainable Futures by Design Education

Nicholas Sebastian Stevens

and

Alma Leora Culén

Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Sustainability 2024, 16(16), 6777; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16166777

Submission received: 30 June 2024 / Revised: 30 July 2024 / Accepted: 4 August 2024 / Published: 7 August 2024

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Education and Approaches)

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Abstract

Design plays an integral role in shaping our everyday lives by providing and mediating the objects and relationships we surround ourselves with. As we find our lifestyles inherently unsustainable, design is therefore also implicated. If design is to fully address this issue and meaningfully contribute to future sustainable lifestyles, then it must undergo significant transformation. Part of this transformation must include design education. While many agree on the necessary transformation of design education, disagreements arise as to what this new education might entail and, significantly, how it might be implemented. This article explores how transformations happen in design education and to what extent such education should tackle significant societal issues, including sustainability, amid the increasing complexity and interdependence of modern-day challenges. It investigates practical issues around implementing such education, its challenges and opportunities, as well as how geographical location might help or hinder through aspects such as social or cultural tendencies, infrastructures or regulation and historical context. To this end, six in-depth interviews were conducted with educators at the forefront of this transformation in Scandinavia, most of whom have established courses and programs that address systemic problems and engage students in reflecting and designing to mitigate current challenges. The analysis of interviews utilised an emergent coding method. It led to four important findings that require attention when considering sustainable design education. The findings are (1) these transformations are often driven by impassioned and visionary individuals, (2) new variants of design must incorporate collaborations at all scales and in various formats, (3) increased responsibility arises from immersion in collaborative projects concerning long-term visions, values, and continuity in design beyond current practices and finally, (4) there are some unresolved tensions found in the balance of practical, reflective, and analytical skills needed. At a more abstract level, this paper positions design education as a significant force in transitioning to sustainable futures.

Keywords:

sustainability; transformative education; sustainable education; transition design; transformative leadership

1. Introduction

Design maintains an enviable position at the interface between industry, business and technology, and personal and social relationships via information and communication technologies; it helps shape the objects we use and the interactions we have every day. However, society currently recognises numerous significant intertwined problems such as climate emergency, environmental degradation, resource depletion, microplastic and PFAS (forever chemicals) pollution, rising inequality, and the undermining of democracy. As these issues directly result from how we currently provision our society or undertake our relations with others, design also bears significant responsibility for these issues. There are multiple proposals for how design and designers might address complex issues such as inequality, democracy erosion, racism, or Western hegemony. However, as Klein argues in her book ‘This Changes Everything’ [1], sustainability is one aspect that unites them all. Regardless of which specific proposal is selected for implementation, if it supports unsustainable design practices then it is problematic. If design is to address these issues seriously, then it must become sustainable. But what exactly does it mean for design to become sustainable, and how might that happen?

Since designs intersect concerns of industry and society, Gaziulusoy and Öztekin [2] have suggested some relevant frameworks that help to outline what sustainable futures might entail. These include working within all planetary boundaries as proposed by the Stockholm Resilience Center [3] and addressing all basic social needs as outlined in Raworth’s Doughnut Economics [4], not only boundaries concerning climate change and CO₂ emissions but also the most pressing societal issues. Access to clean air, clean drinking water, healthcare, education, safety, and equality must be provided to enable a dignified life. At the same time, we need to guarantee the health of the planet and consider intergenerational justice—not to leave future generations without resources that they will need to live in a similarly dignified manner. Together, the frameworks suggested by Gaziulusoy and Öztekin begin to shape concerns relevant to design and designers as they increasingly engage with developing viable and sustainable futures.

However, the awareness around such issues is not occurring evenly across and within society, leading to tensions between those individuals and institutions who wish to find ways to address things immediately and others who might still need to comprehend the gravity of these issues. An obvious starting point for increasing awareness around these issues and mitigating tensions is to transform design education. However, the same tension is also found within tertiary design education [5,6,7]. Different aspects of the institution respond differently and at different speeds, with further complications caused by administrative, faculty, and regulatory complexities, timeframes, and external funding sources. These complexities and regulatory requirements are at once understandable and restrictive.

Moreover, the proliferation of new job titles and education directions in the design profession, from User Experience Designer to Service Designer, presents a financial opportunity for design education institutions since this proliferation might lead to increased student numbers. However, it is important to note that this growth should not be mistaken for the broader conceptual shifts that design needs to undergo to effectively address the current challenges by design. Simultaneously, many design researchers are also genuinely looking into new alternatives for design research, practice, and education. For instance, Meyer and Norman [8] argue that designers today can bring special value to a range of organizations, from governmental to non-governmental (NGOs), social issues, businesses, healthcare, technology, and education, strongly leveraging design as a discipline that can contribute to solving a variety of challenges. However, they claim that current design education systems seldom prepare students for dealing with them. Making changes in education requires a continuous effort to develop a platform for design and establish new educational practices, thus it is necessary to call for action in defining and developing the value of design in the 21st century, along with education that produces 21st-century designers. Norman and Stappers [9] discuss the new working conditions for designers, such as working in multidisciplinary teams and ‘muddling through’ the complexity of the issues in front of them. Norman described his ideas for design in the new world in his latest book [10], focusing on the meaningful, sustainable, and human-centred. However, many researchers and design proposals strongly advocate post-human or more-than-human design, which includes the stewardship of nature [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Others extend this concern to AI entities, robots or assemblages of humans and technologies [19].

Several progressive proposals were recently made for new design education. They range from courses offered within typical tertiary educational settings such as Design X [9] to proposals questioning the entirety of traditional settings and focusing on alternative educational routes that might better fit the complexity of challenges. For instance, The Low Carbon Design Institute (https://lowcarbondesigninstitute.org, accessed on 30 July 2024) offers short mentorships, Fabrica (https://fabrica.it, accessed on 30 July 2024) offers six-month creative residencies and Kaospilots (https://kaospilot.dk, accessed on 30 July 2024) offers a three-year, change-making educational programme.

Furthermore, renowned educational institutions worldwide are pioneering courses and programs in sustainable and transformative design to address the complex challenges of the 21st century. Among many examples, we highlight a few that we are familiar with: a PhD in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University (https://design.cmu.edu/about-our-programs/phd-transition-design, accessed on 30 July 2024) focusing on fundamental societal change, Design Innovation and Transformation Design at Glasgow School of Arts (https://sit.gsa.ac.uk/programme/design-innovation-transformation-design, accessed on 30 July 2024) engages focusing on complex social issues through participatory processes and strategic thinking, Stanford’s d.school (https://dschool.stanford.edu/, accessed on 30 July 2024) introduces students to future design opportunities, Parsons School of Design’s Transdisciplinary Design master program (https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/mfa-transdisciplinary-design/, accessed on 30 July 2024) addresses pressing global issues by merging social sciences and design practices, and Politecnico di Milano’s International Master in Strategic Design for Innovation and Transformation (https://www.gsom.polimi.it/en/course/international-master-strategic-design-innovation-transformation/, accessed on 30 July 2024) cultivates design leaders to drive meaningful business and societal changes. In addition, many schools offer programs related to sustainable design in the context of systemic change by design. Examples include programs like the Systemic Design Master’s at Politecnico di Torino (https://www.polito.it/en/education/master-s-degree-programmes/systemic-design, accessed on 30 July 2024) and TU Delft (https://www.tudelft.nl/en/, accessed on 30 July 2024), which equip designers to tackle societal challenges with systemic and transition design approaches. Additionally, several Scandinavian institutions like KTH (https://www.kth.se/, accessed on 30 July 2024), Umeå Institute of Design (https://www.umu.se/en/umea-institute-of-design/, accessed on 30 July 2024), Aalto University (https://www.aalto.fi/en/department-of-design, accessed on 30 July 2024), or Oslo School of Architecture and Design (https://aho.no/en/studies/executive-master-systems-oriented-design, accessed on 30 July 2024) offer programs and courses in sustainable development, e.g., Executive Master in Systems Oriented Design [20], blending systemic thinking with sustainable design innovation, OsloMet (https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/research-groups/systemic-design-and-sustainability, accessed on 30 July 2024) emphasises systems thinking for sustainable interventions, and University of Oslo (https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/IN3010/index-eng.html, accessed on 30 July 2024) offers a course in transformative design, which the authors taught jointly. As the very nature of design education is being critiqued, rethought, and re-negotiated, through such efforts, it remains in operation throughout. For the majority of design educators, while a radical rethink of education might be desirable, they often currently work in situations with legacy and frameworks that are difficult to change and so must instead be navigated and slowly rebuilt.

Along with progressive design education proposals and implementations, there have been attempts to understand what skills designers might need to have to contribute more directly to mitigating the diverse challenges that society currently faces. There have been systematic literature reviews, e.g., [21], which provides an overview of current design education offerings and outlines some of the ways institutions develop these educations. However, in this research we seek to uncover the practicalities of implementing sustainable design education, notably (1) what challenges the educators faced in delivering this education, (2) what core skills and capabilities students require and (3), how geographic location acknowledged or utilised in the education.

To this end, our article utilises interviews with six design researchers, practitioners and educators working in Norwegian tertiary institutions to directly assess current conceptions of design among educators. All interviewees were involved in creating new teaching components or programmes that sought to educate students with knowledge and skills that they felt were currently lacking in the education institutions they were involved in.

The interview responses are compared with three internationally recognised developments in new critical pedagogies [22,23,24,25]. These developments were selected as they provide a multi-perspective overview against which to compare the intentions of the interview participants. They are recent and cover the content which is taught in a holistic sustainable design education, the methods, manner, and overall aim of this teaching and, lastly, the characteristics of the educators themselves. As the interviews intended to assess the thinking and concerns behind their actions, the participants were questioned on what skills or aspects they felt were important, regardless of whether they currently taught them or not. The participants in the interviews currently teach some form of holistic, sustainable education, as outlined by Sterling [23] in which the content of the education not only addresses aspects such as social and environmental and sustainability, but the method and outcome also seek to positively contribute to society as well as providing design education to the individual students. Their responses are not necessarily a snapshot of current education but still might be considered an indicator of current health or vitality of thinking among the educators.

2. Background

The background provided in this section is divided into three parts: (1) future-oriented and responsible design, (2) sustainable education, and (3) transformative leadership. The first part is an amalgamation of multiple progressive proposals that seek to transform the design discipline into one that helps transform society rather than continue to provision society in a slightly ‘more’ sustainable manner. It also reflects on the new responsibility of design for its social and environmental outcomes. The second part sets this in light of methods and overall aims of sustainable education, while the third part discusses the role of individuals in transformational processes. The three jointly form a framework against which comparisons of our interview results are evaluated.

2.1. Future-Oriented Design

As outlined in the introduction, there are multiple implementations of future-oriented design education around the world. Transition Design, as suggested by Irwin, Kossoff, Tonkinwise, and Scupelli, has gained traction since its manifesto was published in 2015 [22]. The approach has subsequently been presented through numerous articles [8,12,15,26,27] and applied through a PhD education program [28,29] which gained international renown. Its central premise is that societal transitions to more sustainable futures are needed, and design has a key role in these transitions. The broad interest in the premise helped position design within the related field of sustainability transitions, e.g., [2,30]. Additionally, many universities and design schools have been inspired by the transition design framework to create courses based on a similar model, such as the course that the authors have established and taught. Because of its international recognition and familiarity, it provides a useful and, fortunately, increasingly accepted foundation from which to base discussions of subsequent future-oriented tertiary design curricula. The transition design framework outlines the need for designers to have a more holistic and open-to-new knowledge mindset, be aware of their own values and posture, and engage critically with issues that they aim to mitigate. Situating the design space within the everyday acknowledges the importance of locality and seeks to leverage this to contribute to the satisfaction of needs via local economies that prioritise societal benefits over corporate gains, yet utilise global technologies [31]. The curricula must seek to understand the effects, intricacies and interplays between society, technology, politics, and the economy to observe where interventions might have the most positive impacts. It needs to acknowledge the vast differences in physical and temporal scales that all these subjects entail. From the niche of individual households with day-to-day concerns through to the global scale with inter-generational time spans. When proposing new designs, transition designers consider ways in which their designs might have desired effects, understand the long-term impacts of designs and how they might lead to a change at scale. The four cornerstones of the framework, thus, discuss (1) theories of change that might help conceptualise how the change might occur, (2) clear visions of desirable futures, which need to be scaped through collaborations and partnerships, (3) mindset and posture of designers, and (4) considering new ways of designing—both in practice, but also research concerning methods and skills that are needed to successfully design for positive social impact. New approaches to design, through critical reflection, will likely also result in the retiring of some of the more problematic traits that have lingered within design such as the casual assumptions of technology as progress, or the normative and colonial aspects of prescribing designs for other communities.

Nearly all discussions around transitions involve systemic thinking, and subsequently, require participation in design processes by stakeholders, experts within the domain field, and others. Naturally, the question is how to bring this aspect of designing for desirable social futures into the classroom. One possible answer is to create a multidisciplinary design space within an educational institution, for example, as described in [27], focus on collaboration between industry and academia on real-life projects [26,32], or support systemic design literacy and understanding of rich design spaces [33], or use the classroom to speculate about sustainable futures [34,35,36].

Another central issue arises around the responsibility of design—finding desirable visions, correctly identifying challenges and ways of solving them, standing for designs made, and adjusting them with rapidly changing times. Here, a framework based on PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education), first formulated by the UN [37,38,39] is also helpful in designing education, where the principles centre around purpose, values, partnerships, dialogue, methods, and research, and relate to what was said above. However, how to best integrate them with design practice and design education remains.

Given that future-oriented design and sustainability transitions are relatively new focal points within the design field, there is ample room for further research. This includes exploring frameworks and methods for designing curriculum and engaging students. Importantly, this should be viewed as an ongoing instructional design challenge that we can progressively improve upon over time.

2.2. Sustainable Education

‘Sustainable education’ as articulated by Sterling [23] is education that seeks to benefit communities and the environment; to shift society toward fairer, more inclusive, and sustainable processes, in addition, to benefit the individual and prospective employers. It seeks to enable students of such education to critically and holistically reflect on infrastructures and institutions to contribute toward changing paradigms rather than accepting current injustices. Sterling asserts that sustainable education implies paradigm changes by focusing on higher orders of learning as outlined by Bateson ([40], p. 278). First-order learning focuses on the transfer of information and the functional aspects of learning, leaving the values and beliefs of the learner unchanged. Learning to perform a task using software is an example. In contrast, second-order learning requires a critical assessment of the context and underlying structures and assumptions that create the situation in focus. Third-order learning involves the understanding and recognition that there are alternative configurations or paradigms that can be constructed when underlying contexts are critically examined and challenged. Learners not only understand how the system works and how to work within it but also that the system itself is also a site for intervention. The activity of imparting an education focusing on second and third-order learning is referred to as Transformative Teaching. There is a slight paradox that the same institutions that are tasked with contributing to the continuation and smooth functioning of society through the social reproduction of the dominant narratives [6] are also the ones which will need to provide the impetus and methods of transformation. This has further ramifications as endeavouring to effect transformational changes from within state apparatus such as tertiary educational campuses are at once a good and terrible place to begin.

Education is a vast topic and entails not only numerous fields but also different methods of learning, often has substantial timeframes, involves significant parts of the population, has both individual and societal relevance and has vastly differing meanings for all the individuals involved, for this reason, it is already a complex, wicked system. Asking for education to contribute to societal transformation necessarily complicates it further. A society might require many different outcomes from its education system. Current institutions can often be classified as fulfilling the vocational function of education [41] by developing students for employment. This typically follows a very instrumentalist, mechanistic, and transactional account of education in which information is simply passed onto students without requiring reflection, synthesis, or critical evaluation. However, in addition to the vocational, education can provide a socialization function in which aspects of maintaining society are encouraged, and a liberalization function for the development of individuals and their own potential. The current neoliberal framing of education often seeks to define it as the route of individual self-mobilization [42]. However, the opportunity for education’s fourth function, to take a more substantial role in the positive transformation of society, is often downplayed. All forms of education necessarily entail a mix of these functions, and individuals have further personal reasons for undertaking education. However, it is the transformative function, that future-oriented design curricula need to focus on and adopt. The outcome of this education must contribute to the transformation of society more broadly, as well as help individual development rather than simply equipping people to participate in the perpetuation of problematic processes.

2.3. Transformative Leadership

All the participants in the interviews were also instigators of the courses they teach. Most pushed through the development of the course and its content because they saw a dimension of design that was not part of the educational program. If this is how new educations are created, then the characteristics of the participants and their views on teaching are significant.

In this regard, we bring forward Shield´s [43] Transformative Leadership. Shields builds on Freire´s premise that while education is not the primary method of societal transformation, it is crucial. Transformative leadership (not to be confused with transformational leadership) seeks to enact broader positive societal change in addition to the development of individual students. The theory acknowledges the tensions individuals face attempting to navigate and shift existing power structures to effect equity and positive societal change from within an institution that has considerable power and institutional privilege in the current paradigm. The practice of transformative leadership entails the utilization of that institutional privilege to not only identify but also oppose abuses of power or privilege actively. This requires activist-like qualities of courage and conviction. Characteristics such as these differentiate it from other forms of leadership such as transactional leadership—simply seeking to ensure efficient operation through transactions or transformational leadership—seeking organizational change to better serve the diverse and complex needs of the organization.

Discussing the characteristics of three leadership types—charismatic, transformational, and transactional, Kriger and Zhovtobryukh [25], point out that charismatic leadership is often associated with transformational processes. The motivation, passion, and intellectual stimulation of charismatic leaders often inspire teams and organizations. Also, transformational leaders are encouraged “to question core assumptions about the competitive environment, reformulate problems, and revise proposed solutions accordingly”. Also, Bass et al. [44]. suggest that transformational leaders work with others to generate creative solutions to complex problems, while also supporting personal growth and the capability to handle a broader range of responsibilities.

In design, leadership is not traditionally discussed. However, in curriculum design and delivery, we consider it appropriate to assess why it might matter more than is immediately apparent.

3. Method

How do educators who push the boundaries of design education think and conceptualise programs or courses? How do they implement changes through the proposed curricula? What knowledge and skills do they think that students should have? Does the socio-cultural embeddedness of such education influence its effectiveness? The primary method utilised to tackle these questions is a qualitative, interpretative approach based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews and emergent coding [45] of interview transcripts. Subsequently, the findings are evaluated against the frameworks outlined in the background.

3.1. Interviews

Online interviews with six design educators were conducted by the first author. The interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed. Each participant was interviewed once for a period of between 40 and 75 min. The interviews were semi-structured with the participants being provided beforehand with an outline of questions and the interview trajectory. The participants were asked several common questions such as, how they arrived at teaching, what specific skills they felt future designers required, what current challenges they faced in delivering the education as they envisioned it and how they felt teaching in Norway might help or hinder their teaching. In addition, individually specific questions were asked when relevant during the interview. Both the interviewer and the participant were free to raise aspects or steer the conversations in directions they saw fit. Each participant signed a written consent form and was given a draft of this article for review of their input.

While both authors have at least five years of experience teaching within the field of design and sustainability and experience developing course curriculums to attend to these issues, neither of the authors was interviewed or referred to as a participants in this research.

3.2. Participants

The participants in this study were selected because the authors are familiar with their work on sustainability in education and the broader recognition of that work. All participants have experience creating curriculums and teaching at the intersection of design and technology/sustainable design/systemic design in Norwegian tertiary institutions. One participant works in vocational education of currently practising teachers. All participants had experience developing and implementing courses relating to sustainability, and all except one had over five years of teaching experience. Four of the participants were male, and two were female. Their age spans from late twenties to early seventies, and positions range from PhD candidates (1) through post-doctoral researchers (1) and associate professors (2) to full professors (2). The majority also have experience teaching similar subjects internationally. With one exception, the participants all undertook their educations in stages with periods of work, research, and/or teaching in between, and all have experience working in design in some capacity from in-house, consultancy, or research labs. The value of this was pointed out by a participant “I realised the best experiences at [design] school were with courses that were taught by external teachers [with professional practice experience]”.

3.3. Coding

After the interviews were translated using automatic transcription of the video, a period of collaborative, emergent, open coding via the online workspace Miro was undertaken by the two authors. Each author individually highlighted text portions in the transcripts that directly referred to the research aims. The emergent coding allowed for any other interesting, novel or repetitious aspects to be noticed. It was performed in two iterations. During the first iteration, any text that was found to be highlighted by both coders was placed on a sticky note. All other highlighted text was re-visited and re-negotiated during the second iteration, and either added as a sticky note or discarded, see Figure 1. Together the authors then collated the sticky notes into eight categories. Some of the categories are closely related to questions asked during the interviews, such as skills that students need, or challenges faced in teaching. Others were more reviling of new and sometimes, unexpected aspects However, while there were some revealing responses to the questions about how undertaking teaching in Norway might enable or hinder education, most participants chose to relate their responses to the ways in which the more generic global north societal influence was problematic. Therefore, this category was subsequently enlarged to encompass societal and cultural influences. After completing this process for all transcripts, the authors then further refined each category into subcategories that could be identified such as temporal issues, infrastructural issues or criticality and reflexivity which are then discussed collectively in the following section.

4. Findings

The findings below are collected into groupings developed from the initial coding pass. The subsequent traits or aspects identified with the second pass of the coding are then picked out and articulated in the text, and original quotes are incorporated to exemplify them. These quotes are placed within parentheses and are preceded by the participant’s code, a number between one and six, for example, (P2 ‘quote’).

4.1. Design Skills

Looking in closer detail at design skills that the participants feel are crucial to practice the discipline in a manner in line with the participants’ visions raised the tensions between the practical and theoretical aspects of design, of having a balance between practical, hands-on working and working with research and other disciplines in a reflective manner. Systemic, holistic approaches and critical, reflective skills were unanimously advocated. A need for diversity of viewpoints, approaches, and participants in the course was also raised.

Multiple participants pointed out that the core industrial design skills and focus on practice need to be held strong and, in some instances, feel that these are currently lacking—they observe the tendency toward academization, where students are often working more with their heads, rather than hands (P1: ‘A tension and a worry for me is that, somehow, we have replaced the very skills, practical skills, with the cognitive intellectual ones because we felt that they were somehow underdeveloped’ and P4: ‘industrial design is a kind of tradition that is craft-based and have certain ways and methods that cannot be explicitly taught. They are better learned through practice’).

All participants see systemic perspective as crucial and recognise that it calls for additional skills, tools, methods, mindset and posture, as well as dynamic adjustments to both being a designer and a teacher. They point out that education should, from the start—that is, from the bachelor level, take a broader perspective, include sustainability at different levels, and teach students new tools, techniques, methods, etc. (P5: ‘Systems change should happen in design education as much as design practice.’ P2: ‘I think that it is really important to understand the whole system even though one [designer] might not have the power to change the whole system’). All interviewees consider critical thinking and reflexive practices to be central for all systemic design and sustainability practices (P1: ‘what we mean is the core of learning in design, which is sort of the reflective, reflexive processes and the iterative processes as well.’ P3: ‘As long as we are teaching reflective practitioners, they will be able to adjust to the changes that will come within each one of their specializations.’ P5: ‘can make it critically engaging, but also playful and fun.’ P3: ‘to be able to critically think about what it is that might be broken in both the current economic and democratic systems that have led us to where we are’).

4.2. Essential Values in a Design Program

The participants had many contributions regarding the outline, values, and considerations a curriculum relating to design and sustainability would require. One common thread was linking content between courses, generating re-enforcement. (P1: ‘Make sure that the courses are somehow linked so that the teaching or that the learning can actually move beyond those individual courses.’ P3: ‘We would much prefer it if sustainability was included and wrapped into the course content as opposed to being delivered as a one-day thing’). Some expanded this notion to the education institution itself to make the most of the opportunities that come with viewing the topic of sustainability more holistically. This included utilizing the construction of a new curriculum as a design opportunity itself. In addition, there was a suggestion that the educational institution should be run in a manner that was consistent with what it espoused in teaching (P3: ‘not only from the teachers that are doing my course but also from how the school views itself and its position within its local environment, where it sources the food in its canteen and those questions have to be addressed at a council, a regional council level in Norway’). There we also some shared resonance between many of the suggestions put forward. In terms of concrete suggestions, making the course content and projects both locally relevant and meaningful was mentioned (P3: ‘trying to create a teaching assignment for your students which is meaningful’, P1: ‘Projects involving familiarity and starting from real close’, P2: ‘I think it’s important to focus on the local or national area, problems and issues’, P5: ‘Very few programs ask what does it mean to live in a fossil-free future? What does it mean to actually make technology locally, produce and consume locally, or reuse and repair?’).

Integration of these ideas into design education, along with associated difficulties and opportunities, was also a recurring aspect that was discussed (P3: ‘[when] you want to create a synergistic effect to another discipline, you need buy-in from that opposite side as well. And that requires that everyone is on board. You also need buy-in from your leaders above you, to open up both time and space for that to happen’).

There was a desire that the changes in education were more substantial than the courses that the participants had been able to introduce (P1: ‘We need to co-create a new education together [students and staff]’, P5: ‘Systems change should happen in design education as much as design practice’).

Consideration over students’ future employment was also raised as a concern (P5: ‘You have to be actually making something a program or practice that actually makes sense to them and actually makes them a career’, P4: ‘[we are] very concerned about how things probably change in the future and what kind of future context our students will work in during their during their career’).

Numerous participants raised considerations concerning responsibility in various forms and related to entities such as students, educators, institutions, and national governments towards their citizens (and vice versa), humans toward the environment, and countries’ responsibilities toward each other (P5: ‘So, we actually give them [students] the onus to be responsible for their own ideas. And that kind of empowers them’, P5: ‘It’s a responsibility question, like what do we (educators) do within the system we have?’, ‘Why isn’t there a program for the faculty? And are we critical about our own pedagogical practice?’ and ‘sustainability doesn’t know borders. Climate doesn’t know borders. You need that solidarity between places.’ P1: ‘We tend to think that Norway is very good and doesn’t have that many problems and people work and have a good life. There are, of course, these problems in Norway, like the energy parks or data centres, also like mining areas, and we have an indigenous group of the Sami people who are exploited, and their land is exploited.’ P3: ‘In Norway, there is a very strong belief that things should be solved at a government level.’ and ‘There’s this idea that things need to be solved higher up, which I would agree with, but I don’t think it absolves necessarily...the fact that we need to make some reasonably radical lifestyle changes.’ P1: ‘[in Norway there is] a deep-seated religious idea about being a custodian of nature. … [so, it’s assumed] that it’s also our right to somehow benefit from nature, right?’).

4.3. Challenges

All the participants were able to contribute their perspectives on challenges they come across when teaching in this field. These challenges were both infrastructural difficulties, such as the logistics of teaching within a tertiary institution with semesters, budgets, and other constraints, in addition to the challenges presented by teaching a topic of such enormity in terms of consequence and relevance that is constantly changing, often deals with personal values and conflicts and has few useful, relevant examples. The difficulties faced in dealing with the complexities of scale, time, relations, and consequence are captured by describing climate change as a hyperobject. The term, defined by Morton [46], is commonly described as artefacts of enormous scale or distribution and enduring timespans, but also have other significant qualities such as inter-objectivity in which the hyper object is defined in relation to multiple other entities or objects and nonlocal whereby the hyper object is so pervasive that the local characteristics, while there, are almost unidentifiable and nonrepresentative of the whole. While the vagueness of the definition is contentious, the term still holds value as it helps to articulate further the vast, enduring, yet constantly changing, ephemeral aspects of wicked problems [47]. Difficulties with time and course structures were revealed (P1: ‘[setting] design projects that are meaningful within the course timeframe [is challenging]’, P5: ‘whatever is happening is happening on shoestring budgets’).

The enormity and gravity of the content regarding the climate emergency were expressed (P4: ‘The problem was that it typically was affecting them so much. That they had problems to produce’, P2: ‘It is a very overwhelming topic both for me and also the students’). The shifting nature of the challenges was brought up (P3: ‘The aspects of sustainability that are pressing are of such a large and diffuse nature that it is very difficult for pupils to comprehend them.’ P1: ‘They have elements like emergence, for instance. Stuff happens while you’re working with it. They’re not static’), along with a lack of good examples (P3: ‘It is very challenging and quite uncomfortable for a teacher to stand in front of a class and say we don’t have the answer.’ P2: ‘They [students] were asking for more specific examples that were relevant to their field.’ P5: ‘The most difficult part about systemic change is that there is no right answer when you’re trying to do it.’ and ‘The problem is when critique doesn’t follow up with an alternative, it is then just cynicism’), and the difficulties of dealing with values rather than objectively clear cut cases (P4: ‘I was struggling with flight miles and things like that, taking students to other continents. I think that, in the average, these students will make at least one flight less in their life’).

Complicating issues also arise from design’s interaction with other disciplines and other skills that need to be accommodated and choreographed. In some instances, the material in the participant’s course seems in direct opposition to what is taught elsewhere in the curriculum (P5: ‘I think that I’m trying to unpack a lot of problematic assumptions that were actually implicated into them at the bachelor’s level’).

Historically, design is deeply intertwined with technology and is often used to enable the rollout of new technological advances. Multiple participants raised the predominance of this relationship with technology and its complexity (P3: ‘A lot of times we have this sort of techno-optimism that I see comes through the students,’ and ‘Technology and sustainability are not necessarily mutually inclusive categories within my field.’, P5: ‘Technology cannot solve everything’).

In other instances, there is insufficient boundary-crossing [48] between design and other relevant disciplines such as climate literacy (P5: ‘Actually literacy in terms of this climate literacy is very low—how does design student engage?’). Designers often need to gain some knowledge that is not directly related to design tasks, for example, psychology to facilitate changes in behaviours (P1: ‘Either internally in your organization or end-beneficiaries, you’re asking people to change. Then you have to understand the psychology of change and we (designers) have none of that sort of knowledge currently’).

Many also spoke of the tensions in balancing the more theoretical and conceptual aspects of design and practical skills (P5: ‘It is hard to bring reading and practice together [for students]: it is very difficult for them to bring these two pieces together unless they already [have the experience of] doing so.’, P6: ‘Students find comfort in research and that designing is risky and hard’, P1: ‘A tension and a worry for me that somehow, we have replaced the very skills, practical skills, with the cognitive intellectual skills’).

One of the participants deals with continuing education and considers the opportunity crucial for learning about sustainability. As students often come from different backgrounds, they necessarily work in an interdisciplinary manner, and this raises both strengths and weaknesses (P3: ‘One of the weaknesses of the course, and one of the strengths of it, is that it is available to all vocational teachers in Norway, and so we have a broad range of people from everything from aquaculture in the north of Norway to health and child care in the south of Norway’ and ‘One of the weaknesses is that, because it is an online asynchronous course, [the students] don’t really ever get to meet up and make that critical mass happen. They are spread out for better or for worse). In contrast, other interviewees feel there is too little diversity in the student body (P5: ‘There is a kind of certain demographic of people who get in [the program]. And it is not as diverse as we would like it to be’).

4.4. Opportunities

When a more holistic perspective is taken, opportunities open for discussing alternatives to design, in particular to futures-oriented design, integration between fields (trans and multi-disciplinarity), engagement, participation, and more. At the same time, also accentuates the value of traditional design skills and builds on them as a foundation.

Thankfully, all the participants also felt there was a significant opportunity to make changes and improve design education (P3: ‘The challenges are many, but the ways to creatively solve those projects, I see that there are many as well’). Many pointed to the traditional design skills that were still relevant and could be further utilised in novel areas like the speculative scenarios about possible futures (P4: ‘doing future scenarios, populating them with products or product concepts in order to make what we are talking about, [to demonstrate] social tipping points so that we can convince people, so that we can divert from the trajectory we are on now’, P5: ‘We are trying to do speculative design in a way to, basically, make it more contemporary and relevant for their practice today.’, P1: ‘It is an issue about tools and techniques because, in a sense, they need to be there. Because design is still a craft.’, and P6: ‘We need to let students get used to being uncomfortable.’ and to ‘allow students to be designers’).

Another aspect that was leveraged as a significant opportunity for design and design education was the recognition of the scale and how things might be replicated, both larger and smaller (P3: ‘That realization that what you’re doing at a small level here in this, you know, the small setting is, is also what goes on at a larger scale.’ and P1: ‘Moving into the participatory process, then you move beyond the cognitive capacity of individuals’).

All participants eagerly pointed out ways in which design might explore new ways of its development, from new processes (P1: ‘Multilevel design and connections between layers’) to new ways of collaborating (P1: ‘We actually need to co-create a new teaching together’ and ‘ transdisciplinarity, where we also include users, other voices, other type of non-professional or non-theoretical voices into the process’, P5: ‘Designers could work with these [local] community [institutions], it might be different from the usual pipeline’, P4: ‘It might not be a disadvantage to be a bit naive, professionally naive. That might start discussions in a dialogue with others who know the social settings better or are more well-versed in other fields that are required [for a project, like] including climate science, engineering, or political science), or new focus areas like democracy and democratization (P1: ‘The whole issue now with design is a potential for democratizing complex processes’).

4.5. Societal and Cultural Influences

Participants were also asked how aspects of Nordic societies and culture might contribute to educating designers about sustainability. Many commented on the privileged life position in Norway and found it problematic and helpful. Well-known problematic aspects such as Norway’s significant role in oil and gas extraction and its recent green light for seabed mining were seen as relatively easy entry points into discussions about sustainable practices but also often revealed contested views (P5: ‘It is not unthinkable to have some students who have relatives or some parent working in the oil industry’). While a typical citizen’s view that Norway did not have that many problems also provided avenues into discussions of values, global responsibility, and various trade-offs (P2: ‘We tend to like to think that Norway is very good and doesn’t have that many problems and people work and have a good life. And then, there are, of course, these problems in Norway like the energy parks or data centres, and also like mining areas’). The typical Norwegian conception of the ‘Good Life’ and the significance of material goods within it were widely seen as problematic (P3: ‘The good life is defined from physical attributes (house, car, cabin, etc. rather than social aspects.’, P5: ‘The way of life of Norway is not sustainable’). Others pointed out the high trust that Norwegians have in state institutions seems to lead people to expect the government to sort things out and await regulations before they assess their own positions or lifestyles (P3: ‘There’s this idea that things need to be solved higher up, which I would agree with, but I don’t think it absolves necessarily...the fact that we need to make some reasonably radical lifestyle changes’). The flat hierarchies within Norwegian organisations and educational institutions were seen as generally positive (P1: ‘It’s not in any way assumed that there is no hierarchy, but the social structures that maintain more traditional hierarchy are not that strong so it means that it might be easier for certain complex design processes to actually engage with different levels of an organization for instance’). However, the conflict-averse tendency of Norwegians was thought to be counterproductive (P1: ‘Being shy or averse to conflict? That is not helpful when you’re really trying to create positive change’). The origins of Norwegian pride and enjoyment in nature which is often considered a positive trait when discussing sustainability were seen as more problematic than first assumed (P1: ‘Probably connected to like a deep-seated religious idea about being a custodian of nature, right? So, it means that it’s also our right to somehow benefit from nature’). More generally, the Western-centric view on resources and progress also came under critique (P5: ‘These cultures understand about resources that are different from, a quote-unquote, Western-centric view, there’s an adaptability’ and P1: ‘the Western-centric perspective and the idea of progress needs to be questioned’).

4.6. Relations to Nature

Explicit references to nature were less numerous than expected, but as already mentioned, Norwegians’ custodial views on nature and the recent green light for seabed mining were raised. Design-specific work concerning soil was raised by one participant (P5: ‘Understanding soil-land relations and recuperating human-non-human relations and trying to develop a design fiction that will help us reimagine how it is to sort of relate to soil’). Specific references concerning our planet were raised by only one participant (P2: ‘I feel it is time to move a bit toward planet-centric, earth-centric [design]).

4.7. Personal Reflections of State of Affairs and Education

Unsurprisingly, many discussed the complicated and hypocritical position that many designers/educators find themselves in (P5 ‘It is hard to critique the system when you are also paid by the system.’, P3: ‘They can enact change in their own teaching, but, again, because there is this strong belief that things need to happen higher up without that anchoring of possibilities for change or systematic change within schools at a higher level’ and P4: ‘we try to sort out the problems within the system we have and by that, it has become a kind of delaying strategy’).

Individual drive and energy were seen as crucial (P3: ‘It still relies on passion projects from individual teachers to build that momentum, to get that juggernaut moving’).

Similarly, there was a widespread recognition of the ongoing struggle of design to find its niche and make a meaningful contribution (P5: ‘Design is really struggling to figure out what its place in the world is.’, P6: ‘Design was not geared to real-world complexity.’, P1: ‘In all projects, we are dealing with new organizations, new people, new contexts, new situations, right? So, I mean, we have to move away from prescriptive approaches’).

5. Discussion

Many of the progressive design skills and reflective, critical, and holistic outlooks these participants attempt to instill in their students, significantly overlap with the skillsets and viewpoints outlined in Section 2 of this paper. More broadly, there is also substantial correspondence between how these educators approach their subject matter and Sterling’s [23] concept of Transformative Teaching. It covers aspects such as the process that the educators employ in teaching instances, the ways in which they view the subject, and their aims for the students. In addition, the participants show many of the characteristics of Transformative Leadership [43] beyond being engaged in transformative teaching. These findings have been split into four areas outlined below. They cover the importance of passionate and engaged individuals in driving through significant changes in design curricula, the changing nature of collaboration with designers, particularly in design education, the acknowledgement of responsibility and values within design projects and, finally, some observed tensions within design education.

5.1. Sustainable Education and Transformative Teaching

The multiple and repeated responses that referred to the importance of encouraging criticality amongst students over designs’ past and current problematic contributions, or the conflicting influences that confront students and the novel ways in which design might find new avenues by which to shift society toward more sustainable lifestyles indicate that these educators are involved in ‘Sustainable Education’ as articulated by Sterling. This education is not merely a procedural and mechanistic transfer of design skills for the student to apply these skills without regard. Rather it is an informed education in which both critical thinking, reflection and practical design skills are addressed. In addition, there are attempts to provide a holistic overview of how design contributes to society. Not only in the practical, functional nature of the designed outcomes but also in various other forms such as opening further understandings of possible alternatives, reinforcing or questioning current narratives, pushing back against or making visible problematic processes and understanding the second or third-order consequences of actions or design implementations. This provides the students with material to make more considered and critical assessments and interventions and to leverage design to help make changes the students wish to see occur. This alignment with second and third-order learning as discussed by Sterling is not in itself a research outcome of this work but provides confirmation that these educators are currently undertaking forms of transformative teaching required for design to positively contribute to mitigation rather than exacerbation of existing societal issues.

5.2. The Importance of Driven Individuals

The courses the participants now teach are mainly due to the efforts of these individuals (and, perhaps, a few colleagues) who identified unmet educational needs at their institution and sought to address these shortcomings. Identifying and rectifying the needs is a complex design problem in its own right that requires considerable effort, vision, and commitment, especially when taken on a voluntary capacity, as the institution did not request it. The fact that such courses result from efforts of individual educators, or a small collection of concerned individuals rather than some critical review process reveals more considerable institutional failings but also points to the importance of these far-sighted and dedicated individuals. McGeown and Barry discuss these individuals as willing to go beyond ‘academia as usual’ ([6], p. 1).

Design educators, like our interviewees, often have experience working in design as a profession. While this is likely similar to many other disciplines, it has multiple significant benefits in design. Firstly, this means that the educators have actual practical knowledge of the content they teach and, thus, can easily recognise the instances and challenges that students are likely to face. Furthermore, it also gives such educators an overview of what skills students should have competency in to deal with these challenges. However, fortunately, and possibly differently to other disciplines, these designer-design educators are also experienced in creatively resolving issues on both practical and conceptual levels. Educators can leverage this in creating and implementing curricula for students to provide relevant, practical, engaging, and effective learning situations, even if aspects such as timeframes, funding structures, collaborative partners, and collegial cooperation could be more optimal. In addition, passionate and driven individuals can often have significant effects on an organization and can be more persuasive than financial incentives or organizational requests [25].

This transformation stance is not straightforward for individuals teaching in design, which often directly contributes to many societal predicaments. The industry has large commercial interests in developing talent that can fill existing vacancies. Conversely, developing designers who seek to question and restructure things for societal benefit may seem disruptive and not financially profitable. Resisting such trends is made more difficult when there is little or no alignment within the educational institution to help transformational leaders stand firm.

Consequently, a significant portion of the participants’ efforts go toward helping students unlearn, or at least seriously question, currently dominant but unhelpful viewpoints. This is especially seen in product design, where continuing with ‘business as usual’ is part of a co-opted process where human, environmental and societal resources are exploited for excessive and private financial gain. While this practice of helping students ‘unlearn’ is conceptually simple and logical, it is contentious and personally demanding in practice. As was also mentioned this is even more problematic as Norwegian culture is typically averse to conflict. Shields [43] notes that with Transformative Leadership theory it is acknowledged that aspects of this education will upend and contradict prior pieces of education and possibly challenge deep-seated values.

Interrelatedly, these educators seek to provide visions of alternate ways of practising design in opposition to these problematic narratives managed co-operatively, holistically, synergistically, and sustainably, with the benefits being similarly shared. Such a quest follows the pattern described by the political ecologist Paul Robbins as ‘the hatchet and the seed’ [49], where dominant problematic narratives are critiqued and reflected on, while ideas and visions of alternatives are disseminated to develop into more mutually and societally beneficial narratives.

These characteristics allow educators to push for educational change in the face of possible opposition and to deal with the challenges of actively working to refute dominant problematic narratives to provide an education that aims to beneficially alter wider society as well as the student show significant activist qualities of courage and conviction. According to Shields [43], these qualities, along with the intent to contribute to societal transformation through education, utilising critical and internal reflections, and providing the students with a more holistic and systemic understanding of the issues, categorise the participants as aspiring toward transformative leadership within education. McGeown and Barry ([6], p. 5) call them ‘agents of sustainability’ while Fry calls them ‘proactive dissident educators’ ([7], p. 271).

The actions and viewpoints of these individual design educators might, on the one hand, be viewed as characteristics of transformative leadership and yet, on the other hand, these processes and qualities are also innate to design and might be found in pockets of any design school worldwide. While this does not lessen the significant efforts these participants have exerted or lessen the challenges they have faced, it does point to the fact that positive, significant, recursive, and hopefully accelerating change in design is possible and actually occurring. It also suggests that having progressive design educators is a great way to develop more progressive designers. However, the fact that this way of transforming design education relies on the efforts, visions, and drive of the individuals is, however, highly problematic and unsustainable.

5.3. Collaboration and Facilitation as a New Form of Design

The importance of collaboration was repeated numerous times by all the participants, often in many different forms. Collaborations between students to aid in teaching, collaborations in developing the curriculum, collaborations between various courses to understand the complex nature of the issues at hand, collaborations between students and industry to understand the real issues involved, collaborations with communities so decisions are made by them rather than on their behalf. These ideas of working in partnership then require designers to facilitate and advance processes and projects in open, equitable and respectful ways rather than initiating and imposing designs or viewpoints. These aspects are not necessarily new to design. The participatory design dates to the 1970s and more recently co-design has followed. However, what is different now is the varieties of collaboration, not all of which are specifically part of a process to design an object, interaction, or service. Collaborations in which students undertake a process of teaching each other various techniques require different facilitation than collaborating with industry partners or observing implementations of a service as do the myriad other variants. In addition, most of these facilitations will likely be dealing with individuals’ values rather than material facts making the discussions, facilitations, and negotiations even more complex and fractious. One participant found success in navigating complex collaborations using a technique they called ‘professional naivete’ in which they used their unfamiliarity on particular topics to then ask questions and thus start dialogues.

Aspects of collaboration can also be identified in participants’ views on the role of education. These participants tended to place a higher priority on the collective capacity of education in line with views to contribute to the transformation of society. This contrasted with typical narratives of education as an avenue for individual social mobility [42]. The two are not mutually exclusive and many responses here also discuss that these students need to put these educations to work subsequently. However, the larger perspective is the more collaborative or collective view of education and the transformation of society.

The participants were openly looking, often in collaboration with students for new ways in which they might help the students themselves effect further change. Here there was acknowledgment that designers as a profession have been generally very successful at giving people what they want, which has contributed to mass consumerism. The focus now needs to shift toward understanding the difficulties and psychological aspects people face when undergoing change. This teaching is also conducted while recognizing that there are larger, more influential, and possibly contradictory drivers found in the social culture environments we inhabit. As Tonkinwise asserts, design is concerned with practice but cannot determine a practice on its own [50].

Another aspect of collaboration, which is related to resilience can be seen in the participants’ focus on locally appropriate outcomes or cosmopolitan localism, with many discussing the importance of finding local, relevant projects for students to partake in and using local issues to discuss aspects such as values-based decisions or the systemic nature of the situation at hand.

Each of the participants seeks to move away from attempts to pull design education backwards toward more historical, mechanistic, and reductivist directions that a simple transmissive education offers. Rather than simply educating individual students to then fulfil design positions, instead, they seek to provide an education that develops whole systems thinkers, who are collaborative, critical, reflective, and able to synthesise and facilitate and who are then able to go out and attempt to encourage positive societal change more broadly. In this manner, they are attempting transformational education [23].

5.4. Personal Values and Responsibility

In contrast to other design processes such as Human Centered Design (HCD) which focuses on users while tending to leave unexamined the designers’ viewpoints, future-oriented design proposals deal with the personal viewpoints that the designers themselves require to negotiate the project.

While a critical and reflective outlook is often sought in current design education, most do not utilise the opportunity to turn that reflection inward toward the profession, the education system, and the practitioners themselves. However, there are numerous examples from the participants where they would like the students to turn this critical reflection toward societal tendencies that contribute to the predicaments but also reflect inward on current design practices they undertake and more rigorously on themselves.

An additional aspect the participants raised that requires discussion regarding current design education is responsibility. Again, there were many variants of responsibility, such as the educator’s responsibility to the students to come away with an employable skillset. The onus on the designer to both understand and accept the responsibilities of the object, services, or processes they develop. The responsibility of the discipline is to critically assess its role in the current crisis. These responsibilities are currently present in design and design education, but very much overlooked. The examination of personal viewpoints and a critical reflection of the designer’s position is intended to address this disregard for responsibility. In these transformative projects in which change is sought, the designer’s involvement shifts from that of an external implementer of a product or service, toward being an integral participant in developing a process. In addition, the time span of projects is typically longer in transformation projects compared with product delivery projects. This extended timespan allows for interventions and explorations to address observed issues. The extended timeframe and the more personal involvement together with the shift in the role of the designer will tend to beneficially increase their feelings of responsibility toward that project.

5.5. Tensions

An area of unresolved tension that becomes obvious both from the participants’ responses and from within the literature on future-oriented design proposals is identifying the balance between practical design skills and more theoretical understandings of societal transition, economics, psychology etc. The practical design skills learnt in a studio setting and developed through an iterative, cyclical process of physical application and exploration with periods of critique and reflection were strongly appreciated and often mentioned by several of the participants with phrases such as P1 ‘It’s always an issue about tools and techniques. They need to be there because it’s still a craft. But I don’t feel that there’s a real discussion about what the tools and the techniques are’. P4 ‘An industrial design kind of tradition that is craft-based and has certain ways and methods that are not that explicitly taught. It’s more learned by practice. and P6 ‘We need to allow students to be designers.’ However, as indicated by P1, even within this discussion of practical skills versus more academic skills there are still large disagreements about what these physical skills entail. Additionally, it was raised that this discussion of which practical skills are required is not a new issue but on ongoing with P4 indicating that there is already an argument that these skills are being eroded ‘there is some kind of core skills at least, which we are about to lose, in industrial design, in this academization’.

So, while this tension is problematic and requires attention, it is possibly a problem that will need constant attention to maintain a useful ratio between academic and practical skills. It is likely that, as is also currently the case, this balance will differ widely between various schools, individuals, and project requirements. But rather than seeing this as problematic and a problem that must (or even can) be resolved, this might be a useful and healthy debate to have. In ensuring that these important issues are given the attention they deserve rather than it being a case of “setting and forgetting” and risking design education becoming too procedural.

An issue repeated by all the participants was a complaint about a lack of examples to show to students. As is often the case with sustainability, this is a recursive problem. It is difficult to find examples because the task itself is difficult. Of course, if it were easy the problem would not exist. However, the desired characteristics of the design education can help in this regard. Providing students with novel or innovative projects in similar but non-identical contexts, i.e., differing locations, eras, technologies or practices, requires the students to reflect and abstract the underpinning aspects to then apply them to more relevant contexts. While not easy for the educators or the students, this reflective, abstractive process might aid in resisting a procedural approach.

An additional tension is the fact that significant changes to the education system must necessarily involve a transition. Students currently enrolled need to be able to complete the education they embarked on and changes to curricula require time to be developed and approved. This means that the process of change needs to be carefully choreographed in stages to accommodate all these aspects and still remain functional, attractive and relevant. In this regard, the transformation of education makes a useful exemplar of the intricacies of transitions required elsewhere in society to move to more sustainable lifestyles. These larger changes also need to be implemented in considered and sequential manners as everyday life will also be in constant operation.

6. Conclusions

In contrast to other work discussed in the background, our interviews with six design educators directly assess current conceptions of design among educators in Norway and the challenges they face as they endeavour to implement progressive design education.

The findings are (1) that these transformations are often driven by impassioned and visionary individuals. While this is not entirely sustainable, scalable, or ethical, it is more in line with calls for design to provide bespoke, locally appropriate, and locally resourced solutions instead of generic, mechanistic, and instrumentalist versions. (2) These new variants of design must incorporate collaborations at all scales and formats. This includes students collaborating in curriculums, industry collaborating in projects and communities collaborating in design. A significant relevant skill will, therefore, be how designers adopt the role of facilitator in these collaborations. (3) Arising from immersion within collaborative projects comes the benefits and challenges of increased responsibility. This contributes to extending project lifespans in which observations and interventions continue long after the ‘traditional’ design project is concluded. (4) Finally, there are some unresolved tensions found in the balance of practical, reflective, and analytical skills needed, as discussed by the participants, in addition to the multiple existing challenges of education, including the aims society has for education and the fact that the transforming education needs to remain functioning throughout the transition. While not denying the benefits and the need for a more considered and designed approach to developing a comprehensive and relevant design education as articulated by Brosens et al. [21], the findings outlined here also optimistically point to the immediate impact that driven, individuals can have in reshaping design education and leveraging design´s contribution to shifting society to more sustainable lifestyles.

Author Contributions

Interviews undertaken by N.S.S.; formal analysis, N.S.S. and A.L.C.; writing—original draft preparation, N.S.S.; writing—review and editing, N.S.S. and A.L.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted with the approval of Sikt–Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research—Reference number 972408.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed, written consent has been obtained from the participants to publish this paper.

Data Availability Statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Figure 1. An illustration of the analysis process. The top of the image shows small portions of text by P4 and P1, slightly modified to exclude any recognizable references (the missing text is replaced by …) demonstrating how color-coding was used (green highlight when coders fully agreed, blue for the first, and orange for the second coder). The lower part of the image shows sticky notes for both iterations, with the initial naming of categories.

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Stevens, N.S.; Culén, A.L. Toward Sustainable Futures by Design Education. Sustainability 2024, 16, 6777. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16166777

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Stevens NS, Culén AL. Toward Sustainable Futures by Design Education. Sustainability. 2024; 16(16):6777. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16166777

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Stevens, Nicholas Sebastian, and Alma Leora Culén. 2024. "Toward Sustainable Futures by Design Education" Sustainability 16, no. 16: 6777. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16166777

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