The Evolution of Design for Sustainability (DfS) at IDE: From Ecodesign to Design for Transitions

Abstract to come.

A Practical Utopia: The Rise and Rise of Sustainability 

How have we come to love sustainability? This lecture examines how a new approach to sustainability emerged since the 1950s in response to the mounting problems of industrialization and mass consumption. Sustainability subsumed new ways of viewing the world: thinking in terms of interdependence, striving for balance between economic, social, and environmental concerns, and fostering belief in the possibility of achieving this balance through scientific knowledge and transnational governance. Yet sustainability has never been primarily an abstract idea. Our understanding of sustainability has evolved largely through practices. It combined a paradoxical range of practical approaches: the simultaneous embrace of "grand" global thinking alongside a return to small-scale, localized solutions. This lecture will explore how advocates of different sustainability models have operated at the intersection of idealistic visions and practical implementations. An understanding of the concurrent varieties of sustainability helps explain its current popularity, the pitfalls it faces, and the opportunities it offers.

Ideology & Methodology: A History of Ecological Design in an Educational Setting

Increased attention to ecology and environmental problems is a prominent aspect of the transformation of design cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. In this talk, I will argue that a key characteristic of this formation was the close and reciprocal interrelations between ideology and methodology, as practitioners, critics, educators, students, and activists awoken by the ecological crisis struggled to find new answers to the questions of what design should be, and how it should be practiced. Examples are taken from the fields of design education and design activism, where the interaction between ideology and methodology has been especially strong. Both education and activism are ideologically charged and methodologically explicit, and therefore lend themselves to analysis of the relation between the two modes of thought. These examples demonstrate that the dynamic relation between the why and the how was integral to the shaping of ecological design.