Teaching to Dexign Futures in Cities

any design educators are concerned with urgent problems such as sustainable development [1] climate change, climate mitigation, and climate adaptation [2]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 1.5oC report clearly states that rapid decarbonisation by 50% is needed by year 2030 and 100% decarbonization by year 2050 to avoid climate catastrophe. Such challenges effect everyday existence within the biosphere, and require short-term design action alignment with long-term vision goals. However, many design educators teach to design for increasingly shorter time horizons (e.g., human-centered design, rapid-prototyping, agile). In this paper, we describe a course that teaches design students how to align short-term design to long-term timescales. We leverage Future Studies researchers’ work on teaching students greater agency within long-term timescale horizons [3]. We describe an effective and efficient blended learning design pedagogy (e.g., combining online and face-to-face learning activities) [4] to engage with new global challenges such as climate change and sustainability (e.g.,[5]). In the paper, we will describe cases study of taking parts of an open-source course developed for Design students at Carnegie Mellon University and modifying and re-contexualizing the materials in a design course at the Politecnico di Milano. Similar efforts are ongoing at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and Georgia Tech University, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Change is exponential in the 21st century. Products and services are developed faster, have shorter lifecycles, and exist in the wider context with global challenges such as climate change and sustainability. Design for the 21st century requires different skills; design educators are challenged to adapt. What is the best use of limited student time and attention? How might new topics be taught in different universities worldwide? How might classes be structured: size, duration, frequency? How might effort be placed and allocated in class and outside? How effective are particular teaching methods? Enlightened course design relies on three pillars: applying the research on what works best for learning, data-informed iteration, and engagement with real-world problems. Design educators are examining (and some are radically changing) their teaching pedagogies to engage with global challenges such as climate change, adaptation, mitigation, and sustainability. The Dexign Futures course focuses on desirable futures. “Dexign,”an experimental form combining design thinking with futures thinking. In particular, how to align short-term design action with long-term vision goals. We believe the Dexign Futures open-source course described in this case study can play a role in combating climate change from a design perspective given that it is available for university professors worldwide to adapt to their own cultural, social, and national contexts. We write this case study to describe ongoing experimentation with open-source learning materials between different courses held at different universities. The focus of the teaching materials is a case study on Masdar City, in the United Arab Emirates. Given Masdar's focus on sustainability, design students are asked to design products, services, spaces, and experiences within Masdar. Students learn to apply design thinking and futures thinking while envisioning futures oriented products, services, spaces, and experiences. This is an interesting case study for Architecture/Design School Educators because the open-source learning materials described are open-source and can be adapted and used in courses taught in universities worldwide. We will survey students and university professors with a voluntary anonymous online survey questions, in order to elicit insights into the student learning experiences. The course instructors will be interviewed to describe the challenges to learning and teaching the content provided through the Dexign Futures open-source learning materials.