Inclusion of environmental and social aspects of sustainability in industrial design education

The imperative to teach future generations of industrial designers about the ecological and social sustainability aspects of their practice needs no argument. The profession has generally been blamed for promoting conspicuous consumption and stylistic obsolescence, and designers are considered indirectly responsible for the masses of discarded and short-lived objects in landfill. This paper examines how industrial design education is making up for past errors in design practice. It looks at the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of industrial design universities in various countries around the world, searching for evidences of both ecologically and socially sustainable design in the program descriptions, teaching and learning modules, and galleries of student works appearing on university websites. This research will be useful for industrial design course leaders and academics who are interested in benchmarking the extent to which they cover sustainability in their educational programmes, and help them gauge how they fare in educating their students to become more responsible practitioners in the future