Permaeduculture;Towards sustainable learning environments

Sustainable development has become a key concern of our generation considering the various implications the mankind has had over its environment. The balance between consumption and production is an important factor that needs to be observed, in order to achieve sustainability in any given system. Application of sustainable principle has spread across disciplines ranging from service systems to product design. Especially in the field of educational services, there are many scopes of applying sustainable design principles to derive an educational model that rely on learning through thoughtful observation rather than thoughtless labor. Eventually, iterating the prevalent system into one that sustains itself organically in the course of time. This thesis attempts to understand sustainability in learning ecosystems in regards to consumption of information over production of knowledge in the prevalent learning environments. The model of education termed as “Permaeduculture” is conceived as an abstract idea derived from the parallels between natural ecosystems and ecosystem of knowledge, studied under this project. The context of this thesis is set in rural India where the community is advancing rapidly from a self-sustaining livelihood to a modern consumer economy. Focusing on a specific rural field site in the state of Himachal Pradesh, this project identifies various challenges faced by the prevalent education system, through the medium of participatory workshops, ethnographic research and grassroots innovation. Moreover, the study examines the role played by digital media in Indian education system and how rural communities are affected by it. The outcome of this project is a digital infrastructure proposed for the model of “Permaeduculture” in the form of a decentralized Mesh network