Hasta La Ideas

The Designers Accord Global Summit on Sustainability & Education held October 23rd & 24th in San Francisco, marked an important step forward for the sustainable design movement. For two days a high-powered group of about 100 designers, educators, writers, business strategists, technologists, and futurists were assembled by the leadership of the Designers Accord to “tackle the critical issue of sustainability, consider how best to prepare our educational community to make real change, and imagine what’s next in design education.”

The summit took place in the AutoDesk Design Gallery, a gorgeous flowing space overlooking the Embarcadero Plaza, which is full of physical and virtual examples of how design constructs and transforms the world in which we live. The week leading up to the event had been marked by anticipation for the 350.org day of climate action on October 24th—an historic event, as it was the first ever coordinated, international grassroots action focused on issues of climate change and sustainability. The sights and sounds of a climate action rally being held in the plaza below us lent a sense of both festivity and gravity to the summit.

Day One
Valerie Casey, founder of the Designers Accord, opened the summit by informing us that when we signed in to receive our bags and badges, we were actually signing on as authors of the content we were there to produce. Soon, everyone was sitting up a little straighter, as the realization hit that we were not just here to produce an outcome, not just mingle and learn and get inspired. We were facing the ambitious task of co-creating and publishing a toolkit for integrating principles of sustainability into design education. In a sense, we were being challenged to collaboratively design the next generation of designers.

It struck me that in trying to define how to teach sustainable design, we were ourselves taking on a fairly meaty systems-level sustainable design challenge: How should we design the social machine of education such that everyone who participates in it becomes an agent for sustainable outcomes?

(more…)