Teaching to dexign futures in cities

Abstract

Global challenges, such as Climate Change and Sustainable Development, require the design of sustainable lifestyles, products, services, and cities that reduce carbon intensity by at least 50% before the year 2030 and 100% by the year 2050 to avoid long-term climate catastrophes.

Short-term action is needed to accomplish long-term sustainability goals. We work on the 2030 deadline with every tool available to us: new course development combined with new pedagogy to effectively and efficiently deliver time-based design. We made our courses available online as open source resources within a global network of universities.

In this paper, we describe a project called “Dexign Futures” initially developed at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. This open source learning project is being locally adapted and evaluated with three global partners: at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. In this paper, we describe the general project Dexign Futures and, specifically, the case study workshop conducted at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. We briefly describe the general Dexign Futures project and focus on the seminar conducted at the School of Design of the Polytechnic of Milan to show the possible variations to adapt the global model to specific and local contexts.