Emotional and Entrepreneurial Didactics for Sustainable Design Educations

Students at Higher Educations face a world in need for help to create sustainable solutions for complex systems. But still, European design-graduates finish their studies with a narrow concentration in design skills and lack competencies in order to cope with the complex reality, as well as students lack attachment to the teaching in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). In order to change this, educators need to acknowledge the students personal, motivational and emotional elements before designing the courses.

This article is based on two new discourses in both entrepreneurial and design didactic research – and how they could be connected. The first is “emotional learning” and “emotional design” – regarding how emotions impact the student’s learning process’ in Educations for Sustainable Development. Emotions affect the student’s learning process and their health and well-being (Pekrun, 2014). The other discourse is how the use of value-driven emotional entrepreneurial didactics, based on the connection between emotionally influencing actions / events and the development of entrepreneurial competencies can present a new emotionally based understanding of the value of altruistic (sustainable) outcomes within entrepreneurial educations (Lackeus, 2020).

This paper presents, using one of the experimental methods -comparative- of Research through Design, two emotional tools: “Design for Change - Yggdrasill” from VIA Design, Denmark and “Emotional Analogous Data” from ELISAVA, Barcelona. The first results indicate a need for emotional education, which has an impact on ESD and their development as professionals. For these reasons, both emotional tools presented above can contribute to empower students and teachers to improve Sustainable Design Educations.