Project- based learning: a case study in sustainable design

• Autores: A. McKay, D. Raffo
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 23, no. 6, 2007, págs. 1096-1115
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Most sustainability problems are system problems (for example, transport or food consumption) and almost insoluble without completely new ways of thinking. To address sustainability issues, which in broad terms are the key issues of our times, designers need to be able to understand design problems in context, envisage and describe better future systems and then design products that could be part of a new improved system. This paper introduces a framework for the definition of sustainable design projects. The paper then uses this framework to describe the development and delivery of a sustainable design project to second year Product Design students whose programme of study spans the disciplines of engineering, the visual arts, business and psychology. The project was divided into a number of phases. In the first two phases students worked in teams to research and so build up a clear view of the context for a given problem area (for example, mobile phones); they then used this context as the basis for a definition of a vision of the future (10±15 years from now). Finally, each individual student defined a design brief for a product that might be a part of their team's envisaged future and developed designs that satisfied the brief. In addition to developing design skills and knowledge, the project allowed students to gain first-hand experience of challenges to be addressed in the realization of sustainable products. A key challenge demonstrated through the project was that the future will be about understanding product design in as wide a sense as possible; it is this context, and the derived understanding that comes from design research, that will be key in the future.