Tania Ivanka

This report documents insights and questions that arose from teaching sustainability in design at RMIT University, Australia. Sustainability in this context includes overlapping spheres of social, political, economical, environmental, technological, and spiritual and an awareness of how our everyday lives are already implicated relationally to all other constituents of the world. The report is also critical of the view of sustainability in design that is only limited to the environmental sphere alone, and we present a discussion of a propositional framework for design/designers to locate their practices within.

This paper highlights the role of design and designers in the creation of visual artefacts as boundary objects to be used to facilitate social problem solving. Many problems in human service systems can only be solved by purposive action amongst the stakeholders of the system but each stakeholder has only a partial view of the system. Boundary objects that present a multi-­‐stakeholder perspective can facilitate problem solving by creating representations of the system that are meaningful to all stakeholders. In this study we used sensemaking (often a textual practice) and visualisation to create a high complexity representational artefact to enable shared understandings of an occupational rehabilitation system.

Notions of ‘community’ are still taken-for-granted in Participatory Design discourse, omitting critical examination of how people participate in projects to achieve and evaluate community-based participation and outcomes. This paper critically reflects on challenges and obstacles faced when using participatory design methods in engaging a ‘community’ on bushfire risk awareness. Bushfires are a critical and continuous threat to residents living in regional areas of Australia. Through this project, we identified a critical communication problem in bushfire awareness and preparation caused by ‘fragmented’ networks among a ‘community of place’. This fragmentation contributes to significant communication obstacles in community-level preparation for bushfires. This research explored participatory design ‘scaffolds’ to capture, share and visualise locally relevant knowledge vital in mitigating bushfire risks. These methods facilitated awareness and revealed tacit knowledge on who and what community is. Critical reflection of the project examines how such methods have the potential to facilitate the creation of sub-groups gathered around a common cause. And has also built understanding to avoid ‘imagined’ notions of a community that can hide social heterogeneity.

In this paper we argue that the current conceptions of sustainability through the Triple Bottom Line are limited, resulting in the social and environmental bottom lines being traded off against economic concerns. Design education reinforces a linear reductionist paradigm of practice. When applied to design for sustainability this paradigm echoes the prioritisation of the economic bottom line through eco-efficient design. So when students are confronted by the complexity of wicked problems and sustainability, they can become overwhelmed and default to eco-efficiency solutions. Our insights are drawn from critical reflection on design education for sustainability practice, a literature review of design education for sustainability and a reflective workshop with education practitioners. These insights have led us to develop a reflective framework of six spheres to enable a more holistic understanding of design for sustainability. By visualising these spheres as interconnected, students and designers can engage in constructive reflection and conversations about their ideas in a world of complexity and interconnectedness.

... Research quality; Scholarly journals; Scholarly publishing; Surveys; Universities Publisher Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology Language English Publisher URL http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/ Copyright Copyright © 2008 Ken Friedman, Deirdre Barron ...