Future living studio: Socio-technical experiments in sustainable design

Local creative community and design engineers are key stakeholders in initiating a local discourse on sustainability that includes considerations of production and consumption issues. The role of designers is increasingly changing to that of a strategic or facilitator role. Aligned with this global development, we developed Future Living Studio (FLS) as a platform for intercultural exchange to influence strategic design input on sustainable design and production issues for Vietnamese companies branded products. FLS is a series of 3-month design collaborations between local and foreign designers developed in Vietnam to promote reciprocal learning on sustainability through a studio approach. Vietnamese designers (during each studio, respectively), external designers, and local companies collaborated, in a learning-by-doing process. The collaborations’ design visions and product concepts embody aspects of the learning process. In this paper, we reflect on the first two editions of FLS, developed through an action research approach. Between the iterations we experimented with the different stakeholders involved and project framing. Training curriculum and developed facilitation tools aimed at improving collaboration processes based on our experience from the first studio. The aim of this study is to investigate how design can support learning processes to improve international design collaborations in Vietnam. We compare evidence for first and second order learning within the two studios with a focus on the Vietnamese designers involved. We found that learning was improved with the second iteration. The results suggest that designing with first and second-order learning in mind is a promising approach for introducing sustainable design in Vietnam. Focusing on valorizing and representing knowledge of stakeholders involved supports learning and the collaboration processes. A learning approach creates a better foundation to potentially take the next step towards a longer-term transition to sustainability, which relies on local context and knowledge to pursue inclusion into lasting global discourse and processes