Social Design Through Facilitation and Collaboration

Abstract

Sustainability and social design are paradigms central to contemporary planning and design education. This chapter takes sustainability and social design beyond the subject of teaching and instead focuses on incorporating these values as a way of practice in professional education. Using a case study approach, it explores the emerging practices of teaching experiments in the collaborative design and planning teacher learning community (CPDTLC), an informal community of practice with shared interests in collaboration at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. Four pedagogical approaches—learning by doing, reflection, collaboration, and community context—are the common practices among the members. Design thinking is used to analyze the social design innovations of CPDTLC. The experiences here reveal different scales and dimensions of social design in the classroom and beyond, and delineate an emerging teaching-learning relationship for new curriculum formation in the future.