Education Feature:
Design education for the conceptual age

Presented at the Icsid Design Education Conference 2009, this paper by Jan and Richard Coker asserts that design education must move away from a singular focus on commercialism and toward enhancing human flourishing and collaboration with multiple and diverse stakeholders, cultures, societies and disciplines.
[Image: Icsid Design Education Conference 2009 stage]
Icsid Design Education Conference 2009 in Singapore

An education responding to the needs of the future

For the past 10 years the authors have been advocating, developing, trialing and calling for industrial design curricula to address the future by engaging a platform of ethics and focusing education toward social ecology and service to humanity.

It has been our contention that for industrial design education to remain viable it needs to teach collaborative skills toward universal design agendas within a context that promotes sustainability. This is now lucidly apparent as the whole world struggles its way through a move from selfishness to global cooperation. Designers have a choice of participating as members of the greater human family, to create new possibilities for social and planetary survival or risk being sidelined in the grand enterprise of creating the future.

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