Perspectives on the role of materials in sustainable product design education

This paper discusses present and future roles of materials in sustainable design with a focus on design education. With a multifaceted understanding of materials, from an educational perspective, the challenge is to ensure that students are able to navigate within the materials in the design field and to reflect on its potentials and limitations in the process. Moreover, when further targeting materials within a design for sustainability agenda that is complex in itself, it has been observed that students find it overwhelming. Accordingly, the paper unfolds ways of understanding the role of materials in sustainable design education as a way to demonstrate the positions they can take as future designers. Based on a study conducted during a materials course in a sustainable design engineering program, research was done on how students perceive the role of materials in sustainable design. This was done by extracting statements from students’ final assessments that were framed as essays on the topic. The statements, clustered into categories, illustrated the diversity of approaches students take. For teaching, this underscores the necessity to not only apply a broad perspective in the field of materials in sustainable design, but also to emphasize the large degree of entanglement and interdependency between perspectives. To further discuss this in an educational context and to facilitate developing teaching within this topic, a space unfolding two frameworks, one that considers key competences in working with sustainability and another that discusses the increasing number of approaches embracing design for sustainability, was introduced as a means to describe the complexity in the field. The space was first used to position categories of students’ approaches from the empirical study, then expanded to propose four future roles of materials: as environmental impactors, as re-establishing connections, as moderators for social innovation and as media for critical and speculative design.