Welcome to the SiDE Project by IIT Delhi & TU Delft

SiDE Symposium
TU Delft 2025

What Was Sustainability?
The Past, Present, and Future of Sustainability in Design and its Education

A two-day symposium
March 26-27, 2025 at IDE, TU Delft

Organised by Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology in collaboration with IIT Delhi

Free Registration

Introduction

The symposium, “What Was Sustainability?: The Past, Present, and Future of Sustainability in Design and its Education,” March 26-27, 2025 at the Delft University of Technology, will bring together educators and researchers to explore sustainability, as a concept and set of practices, in design and design education. The symposium will focus in part on the experience of TU Delft, with the goal of contextualizing that within larger narratives of Dutch, European, and global design education, as well as of sustainability beyond design. This is a collaboration with IIT Delhi and a counterpart to the SiDE Symposium there in January (see above).

Keynote Speakers

Prof. JC Diehl
TU Delft

Wed. 26 March

9:15-10:00 at IDE Arena

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

Abstract to come.

Prof. Peter van Dam
University of Amsterdam

Wed. 26 March

13:30-14:30 at IDE Arena

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.

Prof. Kjetil Fallan
University of Oslo

Thurs. 27 March

13:30-14:30 at IDE Arena

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.

Schedule of Events

Schedule SiDE TU Delft

Speakers

Damian White
The Rhode Island School of Design , USA
Planetary Designs and Speculative Climate Design Futures

Dr. Taryn Mead
IE University - Segovia
Spain
Technocentric Sustainability and the Digitized Designer: Recentering Design Education as an Embodied and Relational Endeavor

Prof. Sven Quadflieg
Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences
Germany
The Unbearable Lightness of Designing* (Online)

Dustin Jessen

Germany
The Unbearable Lightness of Designing* (Online)

Dr. Sharon Prendeville
Loughborough University, UK
What Comes after Regenerative Design?* (Online)

Sam Bennett
Technology University of Eindhoven, Netherlands
The Friction of Reintegrating Slowness, Care, and Attention into the Contemporary Classroom through Mending

Dr. Michael Stead
Lancaster University,
UK
Reimagining Design Education to Engender Sustainable and Inclusive Futures: Developing More-than-Human Design Pedagogy

Prof. Pramod Khadilkar
Department of Design
IIT Delhi, India
Sustaining interventions at resource constrained populations* (Online)

Prof. Susanne Ritzmann
Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany
Unlearning Design

Prof. Florian Sametinger
University of Arts Linz
Austria
Unlearning Design

Prof. Vijay Chariar
Centre for Rural Development and Technology
IIT Delhi, India
Sustainability* (Online)

Prof. Fernando Secomandi
TU Delft
Netherlands
Design for Our Future… with GenAI?

Prof Jeremy Faludi
TU Delft
Netherlands
Sustainability in the Future of Design Education

Nitya Sankhe
Rhode Island School of Design, USA
Whose Future? Rethinking Climate Change Pedagogy for Indigenous Communities* (Online)

Prof. Natalie Weinmann
Coburg University,
Germany
Design Strategies for a Sustainable Future: A Model for Transdisciplinary Sustainability Education in Design* (Online)

Franziska Ritz

Coburg University, Germany

Design Strategies for a Sustainable Future: A Model for Transdisciplinary Sustainability Education in Design* (Online)

Organisers

Dr. Samuel Franklin
Industrial Design Engineering
TU Delft
Design History

Prof. Saurabh Tewari
Design
IIT Delhi
Communication Design
Design History

Symposium Venue: TU Delft

Symposium Venue

TU Delft
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering

Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, Netherlands

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SiDE Symposium TU Delft 2025

What Was Sustainability?The Past, Present, and Future of Sustainability in Design and its Education

A two-day symposiumMarch 26-27, 2025 at IDE, TU DelftOrganised by Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology in collaboration with IIT Delhi