Background
Technology design education has a long tradition of human-centred design addressing human values. The majority of the technology design methodologies taught today are geared towards humans (user needs), use (consumption), and profit (e.g., user-centred design). Also, as put forward in previous research and by design professionals there is a need to extend the repertoire of technology design methods to achieve fulfilling the UN Sustainable Development Goals where all the three levels: people (society), planet (biosphere), profit (economy) are addressed.
Up to now, the technology design community tends to incorporate the values of people and profit, but not as much the planetary values. A sustainable technology design agenda also encompasses planetary and non-use perspectives (as practised in the degrowth movement), and where reflective data practices are put at the centre of the design process by, for example, critically and constructively engaging with more-than-human entities, energy-saving computational algorithms, green design patterns, and when necessary, AI technology.
As future generations are posed to address today’s environmental problems require new competencies on how to teach sustainability technology design.
Objective
The overarching objective of REDUCE is to create conditions for students to grow into responsible and sustainability-sensitive designers, who can leverage data as an active and critical resource in understanding, constructing and evaluating sustainable technology design, including the deliberate consideration to not design a certain technology. Acquiring such reflective data practices skills will be crucial for future technology design practitioners in their strive to achieve sustainable futures.
The educational resources developed as part of REDUCE include activities for teaching sustainable technology design:
- With data – data as a design material (grounding design in data, including data practices of curating, storing and computing with data),
- Through data – data in design methods (green design patterns, e.g., lazy loading of data), data narrating more-than-human perspective, holistic evaluation),
- By data – generative design (AI).
The educational resources developed will be shared as an open educational resource (OER), published online to be freely downloaded by teachers in technology design programmes.
Target groups
The direct target group of the OER, is teachers, and heads of programmes at technology design programmes in higher education, such as interaction design, computer science, data science, engineering, industrial and product design.
The indirect target group is students who through the teachers’ adoption and use of the educational resources will obtain the skills and competencies to design with reflective data practices.
The project is based on a collaboration between Malmö University (coordinator), Aarhus University, Eindhoven University of Technology, WB Advies & Communicatie and co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme.