EXPERIENTIAL VALUES AS PROMOTERS FOR EMERGING VIEWS ON SUSTAINABLE DESIGN EDUCATION
Year: 2016
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Ahmed Kovacevic, Lyndon Buck, Christian Tollestrup, Kaare Eriksen, Nis Ovesen
Author: Hasling, Karen Marie
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Design School Kolding, Denmark
Section: Research in Design Education
Page(s): 204-209
ISBN: 978-1-904670-62-9
Abstract
This paper explores dynamics between materials use, technical and experiential attributes and
experiential sustainability to promote sustainable design in design education.
Sustainable development is commonly referring to three aspects: ‘environment’, ‘economy’ and
‘equity/ethics’. Artistic design education puts emphasis on experiential values to support, why users
acquire, use and keep objects and can thus be used as an approach to sustainable design as a way to
understand user’s affections towards objects and enhance efficient exploitation of resources used to
materialize objects.
The experience is that especially artistic design students find it difficult to work with sustainable
development, as it builds on different means than used in the remaining curriculum and learning
environment. Consequently it has been proposed to broaden the scope of sustainable design to include
experiential concerns in what can be called experiential sustainability.
The paper specifically discusses how this fourth dimension can interact with the conventional
understanding of sustainable development to provide materials teaching that prepares students for
working with sustainable design linking it to their own practice as students and the practice of artistic
design as a whole. The experience of this is that when including ‘experience’ as a sustainable design
approach students increasingly acknowledge the competences they acquire as part of their education as
valid for working with sustainable design. Furthermore they find it easier to relate their own practice
to environmental, economic and ethical concerns and to propose holistic sustainable design concepts.
Keywords: Artistic design education, materials teaching, sustainable design, experiential sustainability, materials selection.