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Designing for Sustainability: Systems, ethics and beauty
February 4-22, 2008
Ezio Manzini, Terry Irwin, Michael Braungart, Alastair Fuad-Luke, Karen Blincoe
A choice of weeks is available – see details of the timetable below. Can be taken as a one, two or three week course.
Participants on this course will explore established and emergent trends in sustainable design with a range of expert teachers. Using methodology, innovation and creativity, participants will establish the themes of design solutions for use in their work.
Course Overview
Design has the potential to create solutions to many of the global problems confronting us in the 21st century. It relates not just to products but to social systems, so environmental, ethical, and social concerns need to be placed at the heart of the design process.
Participants on this course will explore the whole range of ways that design can contribute to a more sustainable society, which they can apply, to their particular field of interest or expertise. They will study how nature’s design process can influence human-made design, what constitutes form and function, how beauty relates to sustainable design and how co-design processes can lead to innovative solutions. The final week will provide an introduction to Cradle to Cradle SM Design, a methodology for intelligent product design which takes into account the entire lifecycle of the product.*
The course is intended for everyone whose work or interests involves design including designers, artists, architects, planners, academics and teachers.
Teachers
Ezio Manzini is Professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic and co-author of Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life.
Terry Irwin is a designer and lecturer at the University of Dundee, where she is working on a PhD in Natural Design.
Michael Braungart is a chemist and founder of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Hamburg.
Alastair Fuad-Luke is a facilitator, lecturer, and author of The Eco-Design Handbook, with a special interest in “slow design”.
Karen Blincoe is a designer, environmentalist and educationalist. She is the Director of Schumacher College.
Timetable/Course content
Week 1: February 4-8
Monday
Arrival by 1 pm. Introduction to each other and College; Gaia theory and Schumacher philosophy.
Tuesday
Introduction to sustainable design – Karen Blincoe.
The day will take a look at sustainability in a broader context: design versus sustainable design. Through case studies, Karen will give an overview of the barriers and opportunities which design for sustainability offers the practising designer and the design profession in general, as well as society at large.
Wednesday to Friday
Design for sustainable social innovation: Solutions and scenarios to enhance grass roots innovation in everyday life – Ezio Manzini
This part of the course addresses three key issues:
- Social innovation The concept of grass roots social innovation in everyday life. The concept of promising cases and creative communities and their main characters. Their strengths and weaknesses in relation to the transition towards sustainable ways of living.
- Emerging scenarios Active well-being and distributed economies. Today, creative communities and diffused social enterprises are minorities. Nevertheless, a closer view shows that they are linked to powerful drivers of change. Considering these links their real potentialities emerge and a new scenario appears: the scenario of the multi-local society, based on a new sense of place and on the ideas of active well being and distributed economies.
- Enabling systems Bottom-up, top-down and peer-to-peer interactions. Creative communities and diffused social enterprises are complex and delicate social organizations. For this reason their origin and their existence cannot be planned. But something can be done to make them more probable. A favourable environment can be generated. Supporting services, products, spaces and communication tools can be designed.
Week 2: February 11-14 – Design and Nature
Monday to Thursday
Terry Irwin
Design is at the root of many of the global problems facing 21st century society, yet also has the potential to create solutions to these same problems. Terry Irwin explores the possibility that ‘good design’ must be not only economically viable but sustainable/useful/-beautiful as well. Terry will contrast nature’s design process with our own and, through a series of exercises, participants will explore what constitutes ‘fit’ form. Principles of Holistic Science and in particular Goethe’s phenomenological approach to understanding form will be introduced through drawing in nature.
Questions to be addressed during the week include:
- How natural form comes into being vs how man-made form comes into being
- How principles of Holistic Science can inform a new way of thinking about design
- Goethean Process for designers/other ways of knowing
- Design and the consumer-oriented marketplace
- How health and beauty are related to sustainable design
Friday
Co-design and Innovation – Alastair Fuad-Luke
The journey towards sustainability is collective and depends upon activated citizens (bottom-up) as well as government interventions and commercial trends (top-down). The business approach to using design, under the ‘Design for Environment (for DfE read ‘eco-efficiency’) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agendas, can only partly deliver sustainable consumption and production. What is needed is ‘Design for society’ that invokes the power of participation in the design process. Co-design is a statement of inclusion and equity in co-creating what should be designed by those who will use the product or service. The historical and contemporary role of co-design will be presented and participants will take part in an exercise to demonstrate the power of co-design to generate innovative solutions.
Week 3: February 18-22 – Cradle to Cradle: framework and application
Monday to Friday
Michael Braungart
Cradle to Cradle SM Design is a methodology for intelligent product design taking into account the entire lifecycle of the product. Rather than implicitly sending the material resources of a product to a landfill, Cradle to Cradle SM Design finds solutions for maintaining the worth of these valuable materials. Based on conventions found in the natural world, Cradle to Cradle SM Design has three fundamental principles: (1) Waste equals food (2) Use current solar income, and (3) Celebrate diversity.
Michael Braungart will provide an introduction to Cradle to Cradle SM Design and its historical and current applications. Cradle to Cradle SM arises out of a particular conceptual framework. This framework will be discussed, including the following topics: eco-efficiency versus eco-effectiveness, triple top line approaches and the fractal triangle, biological and technical nutrients, unmarketable products, the biological and technical metabolisms, intelligent materials pooling, life cycle development and innovation. These topics will be explained and illustrated with actual examples of implementation. Additionally, the drivers for and obstacles to the application of Cradle to Cradle SM Design will be discussed.
Departure after lunch on Friday.
Can be taken as a one, two or three week course.
Masters credits available subject to University approval.
Course Fees
For businesses: One week £1,100 Two weeks £1,700 Three weeks £2,100
For individuals, NGOs & Educators: One week £900 Two weeks £1,400 Three weeks £1,800
These include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
How to make an application – click here
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
New feature – reserve your place now
To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
*Cradle to Cradle SM is a service mark of MBDC
Schumacher College is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and as a charity (company no. 1485560, charity no. 279756). Registered office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK.