Dare to Act – How to Re-imagine Design Education
Long before we started +change, and long before the multiple, interlocking crises made it into the evening news, I began to explore the potential of design education to contribute in a meaningful way to the challenges we are facing. What we need is not to teach the students how to fix problems or design band-aids, but to enable them to ask questions about the very nature of design, its abilities, and limitations.
My journey into design is still heavily influenced by having worked on an experimental architecture project in the United States – a project that focused on reimagining urbanism and architecture within social and planetary boundaries. While the project was and is in no way perfect, it has influenced my own work ever since. In the periphery of a rather grand modernist plan, it embraced knowledge about the local, encouraged different forms of knowing, practiced frugality, while at the same time, it never lost sight of what made life worth living. I fear that this is easily done when all energy is directed towards fixing the problems. Agreeing with David Orr (in Wals, 2016, 15-16), we should maybe embrace the question of why we as humans are worth sustaining in the first place – before running off in one direction.
Being part of the +change programs has allowed me to continue the exploration of what responsible and reflective design practices could look like in the company of like-minded scholars. I have had the opportunity to develop alternative learning designs that explore the principles and beliefs that underlie and shape our understanding of design. This has resulted in actively addressing the interconnectedness of objects, systems, and worldviews, while using design-making as an essential way of getting to know the world.
One example of this learning design is the resilience module, offered as part of the students’ first year in the design+change bachelor program. In collaboration with an Australian scholar who specializes in regenerative design practices, we developed this module to foster social-ecological system understanding within design. The course teaches design processes as urgent, creative, and adaptive action in the local, social-ecological systems students inhabit. In this work, we coined the term “resilience-making” (as opposed to “resilience-thinking”) as a designerly way to act upon ideas about small, ecologically, and socially viable transformations. (For a detailed elaboration on this learning design, see Fountain, Carleklev & Hruza (2019), Carleklev & Fountain (2021), and Fountain & Carleklev (2023)).
In work like this, not only do the ontological and epistemological questions regarding design become relevant, but also the pedagogical dimension. In our education, we have the privilege to meet courageous and curious students from all over the world. They have fully understood that their lives will be significantly affected by the ongoing crisis, as they inherit a world characterized by environmental challenges, uncertainties, and widespread injustice. At the same time, they are longing to find their place in the world. And while design education is a good place for experimentation and exploration, it is also a place in which we have the responsibility to embrace the why- and how-dimensions of the learning situation (Illeris, 2007) as much as the what-dimension. This is going to be one of my research focuses for many years to come.”
Recent publications
- Carleklev, S. (2024). Dare to Intervene : Facilitating learning and caring in design education. Design Education in the Anthropocene. New York, Routledge. 9-20.
- Fountain, W., Carleklev, S. (2023). Becoming designers with Earth: propositions for design education. Learn X Design 2023 : Statements of Pedagogy / Practice.
- Carleklev, S., Fountain, W. (2021). Co-Citizen Design Labs in Resilience Making. NORDES 2021, Matters of Scale: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Design Research Conference, Kolding, Denmark. 15-18 August 2021. 318-327.
- Rodgers, P., Innella, G., Bremner, C., Coxon, I., Broadley, C., et al. (2019). The Lancaster Care Charter. Design Issues. 35 (1). 73-77.