Introducing a New Design Culture on Sustainability

As promoted by Sustainable Development Goal 4, cultural and structural investments in high-quality education are important to ensure inclusive and fair quality teaching and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. This is important considering Target 4.7, which promotes the education for Sustainable Development. The role of the Higher Education sector is paramount. To feed students’ curiosity and empathy toward these issues, Design Universities should foster a new design culture hinged on sustainability from the undergraduate level, as this topic is now relevant to any teaching agenda. Students trained in Design for Sustainability can benefit from a vast set of theoretical and design knowledge developed in the field since 90s. It is known that the cultural transition toward sustainability requires systemic changes and original learning processes linking contextual values and students’ needs with strategic policies addressed by cultural institutions. To meet the above bottom-up and top- down drivers and to increase the quality of teaching, learning, and student experience, new modules are needed. This chapter presents the process used for the redesign of the Cultures module, a Year 2 module offered to all students enrolled in the BA (Hons) Product Design programme at the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom, one of the seven BA courses offered at the Lincoln School of Design. This work shows that introducing a robust design culture on Sustainability contributes to a higher quality of undergraduate design programmes with new teaching material and pedagogical methodologies, along with in giving students the chance to be an essential part of holistic and lasting learning processes conceived to converge learners’ needs and design skills required by markets.