The Answers (aka Learning Deficiency Reading) B & C

B. The author asserts that sustainability as “best design practice” is broadly applicable across design disciplines, and that integrating this model into design education is not especially hard. What are the specific changes he suggests?


To start, teachers can assign projects that deal with sustainability--"that nurture a sensitivity to modes of production, energy flow, and material selection [and] waste reduction." Educating students and faculty will also be necessary. Get students to question and debate over the existing paradoxes in being only partly sustainable. For example, cars that are more fuel efficient expend less toxins into the air over time than those that aren't, if you consider the same amount of driving is occurring. However, they are still both spewing toxins into the air. Fuel efficiency is a small step in the right directions, but low calorie vs. no calorie is the ultimate goal.

C. The author says that “design must play a leading role” in changing the way we think about the world–how can design do that?

"Design has the capacity to explore and explain complex systems and to catalyze change through storytelling and by the production of alternative possibilities." The author is trying to say that design has the ability to do almost anything--question, persuade, make statements. It has been an integral part of human existence and has always been coupled with change--sometimes causing it and sometimes supplementing it. Take that idea and apply it to the topic, design is a reflection of society, but it must stand as a reflection of the future of society. As the author boldly states, "it's time to get our heads out of the sand, confront the myths that comfort us, and get to work designing a future we want to and can inhabit."