Education, Environmental Attitudes and the Design Profession: A Masters Thesis

Jack Elliott, Charles GeislerAs the concept of sustainability continues to become more popular within society, a number of different professions are called on to help champion the movement. With the resource strain inflicted by the construction industry alone, dedicated architects and interior designers are important players in forward progress. Though many organizations and associations have been created to help the building industry embrace sustainability both practically and theoretically, the actual implementation of green building practices in construction has been minimal. The main focus of this study is to look at the influence of undergraduate education on designers? interest in sustainable design. Additional interest was in environmental attitudes and the impact of interpersonal relations on those attitudes. Self-proclaimed practitioners in the green building industry were surveyed through a specified email list of the United States Green Building Council. The survey was web-based and addressed issues including environmental attitudes, undergraduate education and professional training. Dunlap and Catton?s widely-used New Ecological Paradigm scale was included to measure proenvironmental orientation of the professionals. Contrary to the main hypothesis of the study, undergraduate education was not seen by subjects to be a fundamental force in the decision to concentrate on sustainability. A number of educational elements typically seen in environmental education, including interpersonal interactions, were mentioned by subjects as substantially influential and are therefore explored