Reimagining Design Education to Engender Sustainable and Inclusive Futures : Developing More-than-Human Design Pedagogy

Stead, Michael (2025) Reimagining Design Education to Engender Sustainable and Inclusive Futures : Developing More-than-Human Design Pedagogy. In: Sustainability in Design Education Symposium 2025, 2025-03-26 - 2025-03-27, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

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Abstract

Improving sustainable education and expertise amongst next generation design students is crucial to redressing our planet’s climate emergency. Yet, much existing literature speaks less to embedding sustainability theory and practice into educative forums and speaks more to realising such strategies in commercial and organisational design settings. In the UK context, there has been a near 70% decline in school-age pupils choosing design-oriented subjects since 2010, whilst the environmental-social-economic benefits of studying creative disciplines including design at college and university remain hugely undervalued. Our geological (‘geo’) era, the Anthropocene, is characterised by a complex network of multi-scale interrelations and dependencies between ecological ‘zoe’ actants (including flora, fauna, water, climate), and ‘techno’ actants (including materials, devices, data, AI). This paper contends that by harnessing a More-than-Human lens, tutors can pedagogically reengage and support students in developing critical and creative proposals that more sustainably and inclusively negotiate today’s deeply entangled ‘zoe-techno-geo’ assemblage.