Conference Agenda

Responsible Design does not appear to be well integrated within Graphic Design in higher education. Students and graduates' experience is likely to be client-focused requirements of a business to deliver financial rewards without addressing the current environmental crisis, pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

The aim of the study presented will be to provide a better understanding of the current awareness among student and recent graduate graphic designers of responsible design and how to integrate it within current professional practice.

Graphic designers have been involved in the evocative presentation and rhetoric around the phenomena of ‘greenwashing’, where sustainability is accounted for through one specific aspect of the design and production, but the overall environmental impact of product development is not clearly addressed. This puts a graphic designer in a difficult position, between satisfying the client's requirements and aspirations and their own professional values.

Graphic Design effectively delivers the message of a product or service’s value to a targeted audience. Advertisement invests heavily in profiling their target market to understand their language, culture, values, and motivations to predict purchasing decision-making and behaviours.

This paper will present a survey of the current professional values of a sample group of Graphic Design students, and recent graduate, and their understanding and experience of Responsible Design in education and industry.

Specifically: 1) what are their current professional values? 2) do they understand what is responsible design within Graphic Design? 3) what is their experience of the industry’s approach to Responsible Design?

The outcomes of this study will be incorporated into teaching resources that will be made freely available to other educators and industries.

Sustainable design is becoming a common practice since there is a global interest in protecting the environment and enhancing the health and well-being of human beings. However, sustainability is a complex issue. The relationship and balance between environmental, economic, and social demands during the design process require an understating of systems, environment and human behavior, and business perspective. Consequently, there is a need to provide engineering students with design knowledge and tools for sustainable design. One tool is persuasive design since this approach is used to influence the users’ behaviors and decisions. The change of behavior of consumers might have a significant impact on waste, contamination, energy and materials consumption, and other sustainability indicators. This paper presents a list of strategies for persuasive design and a pedagogical model to introduce them to engineering design education. The pedagogical model focuses on the application of persuasive design for sustainable design and its ethical dimension.

Integrating sustainability in design activities remains a challenge, as sustainability is a wicked issue, that is, complex, multidimensional, with no ideal solution. To achieve the integration of sustainability in design activities, the involvement of different stakeholders is absolutely necessary as such activities intersect Science, Economics, Politics and Human Behaviour, among other spheres of society. For decades, the third sector has contributed to re-appropriate social challenges and empower citizens to collectively propose solutions to different unsustainability crisis. In France, the ‘popular education’ model proposes different methods to deliver solutions based on the practice of ecological ethics in the design process. We have selected some case studies to demonstrate such integration (ecodesign, climate change and opting-out workshops). This article will make explicit the ecological ethics concerns otherwise implicit from each case study.

Popular education is considered an alternative education paradigm focusing on improving the current social systems. Aiming on a logic of ‘reflection for action’, it puts together practitioners, thinkers and decision makers to emancipate the role of all stakeholders in building better societies. Its activities often take place outside of traditional education institutions, democratising also the space in which those reflections and actions take place. Often implicit in the logic of the ‘popular education’, concepts like 'commons', 'third-place' and 'milieu' seem to relate to the basics of ecological ethics. However, as ‘popular education’ activities are growing (in number and in power) we question the ecological ethics they carry themselves today.

With a nearly chronological path, the field of Design for Sustainability has evolved from a technical perspective (product centred design), to reflection on different socio-technical approaches (human centred and nature centred design for example), and to systems and from insular to systemic reflections and solutions.

In parallel with the evolution of the popular education model and the field of Design for Sustainability, ecological issues have become more evident and mature in the scientific literature, enabling scientists to merge the field of Design to with strong sustainability apporaches. Design for Strong Sustainability requires the integration of direct and indirect stakeholders to ensure the adequacy of the design to the milieu. This type of design is about making sure that technical systems will respect the planetary boundaries while enabling the co-habitation of all the stakeholders (nature, humans and infrastructure) within a defined geo-political space. So, we assume that the practice of Design for Strong Sustainability in ‘popular education’ contexts carry a particularly strong component of ecological ethics.

We will explore such assumptions using three original pedagogical activities that currently complement educational programmes: an ecodesign hackathon involving students in design from engineering and artistic perspectives, a workshop on ‘renunciation’ (opting-out) where participants learn how to go 'mourn' and opt-out, and a Climate Fresk, where participants reflect on climate change.

The output of the paper consist on the analysis of different pedagogical design workshops that take into account an ecological ethics approach. This analysis will help us to strengthen the relationship between pedagogical practices and ethics involved in strong sustainability design pedagogical activities.

Education in digital fabrication design is characterized by an active learning environment in which ideas are developed into prototypes. The manner in which design activities are carried out, the subject matter that is learnt, and the kinds of outputs are all impacted by this environment. Available information concerning sustainability practices and how affects students’ learning and skill acquisition is scarce. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to use a course to evaluate learners’ sustainability practices and educational experience in a digital fabrication class.

The course was designed for first-year university students. It covered the fundamentals of design and digital fabrication, the design of physical items, including electronics design, embedded programming, as well as 3D and 2D design. Throughout seven weeks, students were encouraged to create and implement their own ideas by designing and building a physical prototype that interacts with its surroundings. They learned how to develop basic interactive prototypes by employing mechanical, electrical, and software components. Students worked in teams of three or four members, and as part of their learning, they were required to document their process on a weekly basis. The online documentation and the final design prototype were the main deliverables of the course.

The course examined in this study implemented explicit and detailed sustainability requirements as evaluation criteria that included: reusing components, choosing adequate and sustainable materials, building instead of buying, and easy to reuse project components. Based on data collected from students’ documentation, produced prototypes, course grades, and a pre and post-course self-reported survey, sustainable practices and learning aspects in the sustainability courses were analyzed. The survey focused on the following four scales: self-perceived skills, confidence, motivation, and enjoyment, each represented by five technological dimensions of instruction, such as 2D and 3D design, electronics, programming, and use of tools and devices in digital fabrication space.

Results showed that high-score design outcomes produced by the students included sustainability elements based on the use of materials and processes of the digital fabrication laboratory. Students were concerned with assembling and disassembling reused components, as well as reducing generated waste and emissions, which was found to be critical for effective and sustainable digital fabrication practices.

Generally speaking, findings showed that sustainability as a process and sustainability about the final prototype should be addressed differently. This requires timely actions on sustainability by both students and instructors. Intervention programs should be aware of these sustainability issues affecting digital fabrication design, without compromising design education iterative prototyping and learning.

The Amperstand Studio is an undergraduate multidisciplinary social design studio focused on working with outside partners and stakeholders to solve large scale and complex social problems. This case study presents a one semester project with undergraduate students from graphic design and industrial design. Students worked with medical experts, aeronautical engineers, and human computer interaction experts in three countries to understand and design a strategy in reducing the death and amputation rate from venomous snake bites in Western Africa, specifically Sierra Leone and Guinnea. In this region over 24,000 snake bites annually cause over 3,600 deaths, 4,600 amputations, primarily affecting children and farmers. The road conditions and intense rainfall in this region often lead to intensely long travel times. What in a developed country would be a 30 minute to 2 hour drive, could easily be an 8-48 hour trip over washed out roads. Due to this, snake bitten passengers are transported on the back of a motorcycle. The design problem is if the snake bite victim does receive anti-venom, which costs $6,000 per vial, within one hour the patient will likely lose a limb, and after 6 hours the victim will likely die.

In this paper we discuss how students defined and found approaches the partners had not considered. A rapid design process which could be efficiently implemented was absolutely necessary as the stakeholders were looking to save lives as soon as possible. The students employed an in-depth research study including interviews with experts and users, which helped them understand the needs of a wide range of stakeholders. Through this process they provided systematic design options that went well beyond the partners initial focus on a drone delivery system. Instead of jumping to only a complex and highly expensive drone system to help address this issue, students proposed a series of solutions, which included a step, leap, and jump. The step solutions were able to be acted on immediately, with leap solutions addressed within a short period of time, and jump was a solution which would need additional funding, but would offer a wider range of solutions and included the drone delivering the anti-venom.

The key contributions of the paper center around how design thinking can lead to a more comprehensive range of solutions in complex and large scale social design problems, providing stakeholders with a variety of options which can be implemented in appropriate stages. This project is currently in use in Western Africa.