Re-Form and Re-Design: Design Education and Ethics

Re-Form and Re-Design:
Design Education and Ethics
Peter Fine, New Mexico State University and Eric Benson, University of Illinois

(watch a video of this presentation)

Based on investigations conducted in the design classroom and through our own individual research, this presentation argues that an increased appreciation of the design process, materials and its history are central to how future design problems are understood and how sustainable solutions will be executed. Through a quick analysis of how rapid consumerism has drastically altered the historical relevance of the designer, it becomes clear that the issue of ethics and sustainability must be addressed in our pedagogy in order to maintain our profession. As frightening energy and natural resource issues have grown increasingly in focus internationally, design pedagogy questions are shifting to ask, “How can design programs respond to present or possible future problems related to environmental concerns and design practice?”

This presentation will further explore how our future design education will be one that empowers the designer to become proactive in educating and advocating for positive social changes that can sustain our craft within a new green economy. It will focus historically on the Modernist impulse to reform society through design and how this idea was embraced by the “outlaw designers” of the American counterculture 1960s and 70s (inspired by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog), where they searched for a better way to unite technology and nature. It will also analyze current sustainable design curriculum and trends in our pedagogy that explore a return to a reform-minded vision of design’s role in society and a deeper analysis of the designer as a mediator between production and consumption.