With the right tools, young designers can lead a new wave of effective climate action
But first we need to address the barriers to Climate Design curriculum:
The belief that “Climate is too niche”
The inability to change curriculum due to higher-ed bureaucracy
Lack of funding to support Climate Design in the classroom
A fear of failure to truly make a difference
The New Wave Research Project is a one-of-a-kind research project that centers students’ experiences at the intersection of design education and climate change.
New Wave is meant to uncover:
1) How design students perceive sustainability in the design field
2) How design students want to see climate design integrated into their education
3) What design educators are currently experiencing in the classroom
Now, we want to help design educators make Climate Design a permanent part of their curriculums.
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What we’re hearing from students
“We constantly have to be thinking about what material waste people are putting back out into the environment.”
“Designers have a responsibility to just do better.”
“We hold the power of choosing who produces our stuff…that power doesn’t just lie with the company. It also lies with you and what you think should be happening with your product.”
“Each of the things we produce as designers has some kind of impact that we need to think about before we even open the Adobe program of choice.”
“The responsibility of graphic designers is probably supporting things that are right and doing your best work for those things that are right.”
“Use the power you have, this awesome gift you have of art, to support something that is making a difference.”
FAQ
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If we can teach students how to design for a sustainable world, we will be one step closer to enacting real and powerful climate action. To do that, though, we need to know what students already think about sustainable design, and what barriers educators have to teach them. This research will help answer that. It will inform the CD EDU initiative to develop effective climate design education that professors can easily transfer to their classrooms.
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Answers will be recorded and analyzed for common themes among students and educators and will be studied to find relationships between different themes (for example, finding the relationship between their feelings on their current design education and their perceptions of sustainable design). The answers students and educators give will be stored for as long as the research project continues.
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This research will inform the CD EDU initiative to bring climate design into their classrooms. That being said, the outcomes that are possible from this research include a climate design course, a series of climate design projects, a roadmap for tying climate design into mainstream design pedagogy, or even a toolkit for students to take back to their home institutions to advocate for climate design education. Currently the New Wave projects releases reports on the findings for each set of data collected.
Check out Climify
Our podcast connecting climate scientists and design educators together so that we can bring climate-related projects into our classrooms.
