During the last 4 years, hundreds of people have downloaded the teaching guide for the book The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability. Now it’s time to take stock of the teaching guide. I’m investigating what other materials might support you in teaching sustainable design and I’d like to talk with you about it.
Many universities use the teaching guide and The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability as a text for sustainable design courses. But there are also many other teaching “tools” and texts available and I want to find out how all these help you teach sustainable design.
I frequently hear from university teachers with concerns that we all share about how to help students navigate the scale and complexity of sustainability. We probably all also have a sense that the wider university context affects the way we teach sustainable design.
For example, does your department give faculty members enough support to develop sustainability knowledge? How does your department include sustainability — do they re-badge existing programs, start new degree programs, or send students off to other departments? What about recruiting new students — how does sustainability seem to play into it?
I’d like to hear your views. If you’d be willing to discuss these issues with me further sometime during the next couple of months please email me or leave a comment (ann [at] designers-atlas.net).
Best wishes for a happy new year
I’ve been reading a recent publication from Public Architecture Design for Reuse Primer: 15 Successful Reuse Projects within Different Sectors, Explored In-depth, downloadable through the link. The cases, as well as the general findings in the introduction would work well in teaching a sustainable design course in architecture. The cases include civic buildings, housing, religious…
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I flagged new report from the Higher Education Academy in a recent tweet (@atlasann–I often tweet about resources you can use in teaching sustainable design). The report comes from the Geography& Environmental Sciences section, but I think it has relevance to anyone struggling to teach climate change issues. Ranging from the use of “the campus”…
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Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to measure the uptake by design professions of sustainable design over time. I’m particularly interested in architecture and product design. Obviously there are no official statistics collected on this question, so I’m trying to think of proxies that might indicate the activities of designers in this area…
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It seems that more and more designers interested in sustainability and social impact have an improving range of techniques and tools to apply to individual design projects, for example we have lifecycle impact software, social impact tool kits, and a range of principles that should guide projects and even design practices. My ongoing interest and…
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Although I think my own teaching guide for the Atlas has a lot to offer, there are a number of other teaching tools available. I thought it would be useful, as one of the inaugural posts for this blog, to list a few of them. At this stage I’ve dipped into a few of them…
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This article, from August 2009, describes a range of now “classic” LCA tools along with more recent offerings, including attempts to “open source” some aspects of LCA. Lifecycle Assessment is an approach to design that tries to take a product or building’s entire lifecycle into account at the time of conceptual design to try to…
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As the spring season approaches in colleges, conferences, and exhibitions, sustainable design will be higher on the agenda than ever before. While attending the exhibits and lectures, keep in mind the five central debates of sustainable design: 1 responsibility; 2 pace; 3 appearance; 4 geography; and 5 operability. Who is responsible? Although designers, clients, governments…
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I originally published this as an article in July, 2007 before I had this blog. Now I’m posting some of these older pieces on the blog because, sadly, they remain as timely as ever: 1. Cultivate the good company Corporate attention to money above all else, combined with the power and freedom of global finance,…
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