Beyond the classroom – pedagogy for the real world (original) (raw)
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Like the notion of social impacts in Sustainable Development, social sustainability in design is a complex, contradictory and challenging area. Although not clearly defined, it is often where all the vague and immeasurable elements of Sustainable Design are placed. Addressing the balance of sustainability to include societal and human concerns is seen as a difficult, but necessary task which can lead to an increase in social capital, social cohesion and collaboration across geographical and educational boundaries (Findeli 2008). Encouraging and facilitating collaboration between students in an educational setting is particularly challenging as students' struggle to move past what they know and have learnt in their own cultural settings. Individual student thinking is often rooted in past educational experiences with students getting little exposure to diversities of practice (social and professional) or failing to become engaged in any real cross cultural dialogue. As in every field, designers must learn to cooperate across disciplines and borders. Both knowledge share and collaborative practice serve to open these communication channels and create a community of informed and informative professionals. This paper explores the role international collaborative projects can play in introducing social sustainability into design education. The paper begins by grounding these projects in current theory surrounding social sustainability and educational practices. Subsequently a brief outline of the projects is provided (conducted between students from Universities in New Zealand, Ireland and Chile) and the paper continues to explain the logistics of planning and
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Preparing a workforce that is well-equipped with the skills and knowledge to navigate the complexities of our global human society is a key responsibility of design and higher education. Extant research has advocated design as one of the essential skills to master in the future, and this design literacy has been claimed to be a critical factor in creating innovations and new solutions towards transforming our societies. To explore how non-designers become more design literate, in this paper we present findings from a study looking at how multidisciplinary student teams develop their design literacy in an action-oriented course setting. Based on our initial analysis, blending the boundaries between universities and the surrounding society positively contributes towards developing design literacy. This, in turn, has pedagogical implications as well as increases our understanding on how design travels to other disciplinary domains.
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