Energy for tomorrow, today: Educating future generations to energy sustainability, between didactics and design

In an accompanying Comment to ‘Our Future,’ the 2016 Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing (Ki-Moon, 2016), the then UN Secretary-General proposed a new reading of the ‘SDG’ acronym. Where normally the letter ‘G’ stands for the ‘Goals’ of the 2030 Agenda, Ban Ki Moon suggested it should also stand for the ‘Generation’ for which these goals exist. Indeed, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals were conceived as a contract between world leaders and future generations, the fulfilment of which could transform the world young people of tomorrow will inherit. If it is true that the new generations will receive the world of tomorrow as a legacy, they must participate in its construction as early as today. In this direction, UNESCO has been developing and implementing a paradigm - Education for Sustainable Development - which sees the inclusion of sustainable development issues in the education and training of the young as strategic (UNESCO, 2019). A central topic in the contemporary scientific, professional, and political debate on Sustainable Development is undoubtedly energy. Achieving authentic energy sustainability is, in fact, a goal that is now more urgent than ever, and yet it is rarely addressed effectively and in-depth: on the one hand, because of the complexity of the technical aspects that characterise the concepts related to it, on the other hand, because of the heated debate around the topic itself, which is the cause of instability around its definition. Thus, the challenge of the present is to overcome the one-dimensionality of energy sustainability, apparently “flattened” to a merely technical issue, and to explore it instead with a “three-dimensional” gaze able to embrace its latent cultural, social and behavioural components, and thereby broaden the audience of the energy discourse. In this context, the role of design as a translator discipline appears strategic. Its systemic nature, comprised of technique and narrative, renders it a tool capable of transmitting theoretical and abstract concepts through immediate forms and methods, carrying out a “gentle” action of awareness-raising and education to co-responsibility. This paper intends to provide insight into this scenario, focusing on three didactic-design experiences that have emerged in recent years from the collaboration of ENEA (Italy’s national agency for new technologies, energy, and sustainable economic development) with universities and cultural associations active in northern Italy. The ‘Energy Wall,’ a tactical urbanism operation in which children’s drawings on the theme of energy decorate the wall of a station, carrying out a continuous ‘bottom-up’ educational action; ‘Soft Sculptures - Three-Dimensional Tales for Energy Sustainability,’ a university workshop resulting from an ongoing cross-university research project, in which students were asked to ‘shape’ energy by designing paper sculptures portraying energy-sustainable gestures; and finally “Words & Works - For a child-friendly energy vocabulary” - an action symbolic of this paper’s approach - in which primary school children were asked to suggest new words for adults to talk about energy. The didactic-design experiments presented here provide examples in which the creation of a new inclusive vocabulary for the energy discourse lays its foundations in the involvement of future generations so that that “tomorrow” is entrusted to the hands and minds of those who will live it, starting today.