New Sustainable Creative Didactics in a Design for Change Education

Teaching at design-schools and universities are shaped by disciplinary structures and silos. Faculties and educations are often created from traditional disciplines connected to a specific expected “employable” status of the future graduates. Educators still practice “knowledge teaching” believing this will encourage change-action from the students. But, research in CSD’s has shown this has very little effort. (Frisk & Larsson, 2011, UNESCO, 2004 & 2017) The reports points at series of gaps in knowledge, skills and competencies amongst employees in large as well as small and medium sized companies in function-specific process’ trying to implement sustainable changes or even circular economy. They propose a change from knowledge based to competency-based learning in Sustainability Education (SE). According to these reports, there is a need to integrate social, environmental and ecological basic vocabularies, awareness of the personal responsibility, material-science, didactics and learning-settings with norms, worldviews, beliefs and behaviour in HE’s, aiming to develop an overall educational approach in accordance with behavoural science and core competencies for sustainability build on trans-disciplinary design-solutions. In order to change the educational system, success in acquiring sustainability competencies extends beyond memorization and requires educational institutions also to provide new informal learning settings. But, trans-disciplinary learning settings, real-life sustainability, circular or social challenges or collaborations with “real-people / cases / challenges”, supporting the development of the required competencies are still rare in some universities and design-schools. In Europe progress has been made within the implementation of ESD in HE (Barth, M. et al 2007, UNESCO, 2004 & 2017) and a new research discourse on sustainability education has emerged, asking how we can provide learners with values, norms, knowledge and motivation to encourage economic, social and sustainable development. Thus, SE’s also aim at facilitating the development of competencies needed for dealing with (un)sustainable development (Barth, M. et al 2007, UNESCO, 2004 & 2017)