Educating Future (Re)Generations: Foregrounding Sustainable More-than-Human Approaches in Design Pedagogy

Improving sustainable education and expertise amongst next generation designers is crucial to redressing our planet’s climate emergency. Unfortunately, the environmental, social and economic importance of studying design remains hugely undervalued. For example, in the UK context, there has been a near 70% decline in pre-college/university pupils choosing design-oriented subjects since 2010. Further, whilst there is a gamut of existing Sustainable Design related pedagogic scholarship, much of it speaks to realising such strategies in commercial and organisational settings, as opposed to embedding said knowledge and skills into educative forums. Using UK undergraduate Design teaching as its context, this paper explores how the interrelated approaches of Regenerative Design and More-than-Human-Centred Design can be harnessed as a substrate for next generation Sustainable Design teaching and learning. The paper argues that by doing so, tutors can begin to pedagogically support students in developing critical, creative proposals that more sustainably and inclusively negotiate the implications of today’s pervasive digital technologies.