Sustainable Futures by Design

This course uses design as a lens to understand complex societal and environmental challenges and imagine possible futures, with the goal of transformation: opening up new ways of thinking about design, its ability to cross disciplinary boundaries, and its impact on humanity. Building upon the ethos of the common good, students will observe, experience, and reflect on design across scales and applications, from objects to the built environment and the systems that support them, in order to understand how sustainability informs both the process and product of design. Students will discern their role as co-creators in our shared future as they confront complex problems, using human-centered methods of inquiry to understand them and creative visual tools to express meaning. This course takes a multidisciplinary and systems-approach, integrating product design, architecture, graphic design, and urban planning while taking into account contextual history and key movements to connect and deepen understanding. Course topics may include: ethics and design justice, innovation, play, sustainable design, regenerative design, design thinking, human centered design, and democratic design. Visual research, discussion, creative reflective journaling, and supporting projects will allow students to apply their understanding of the course material and envision a more just and sustainable world, by design.