Anne Chick is Director of the Sustainable Design Research Centre and Course Director of the MA Design for Development at Kingston University in UK. Chick is the co-founder of Greengaged (www.greengaged.com). She is Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, Canada. Chick is an Associate Editor on the Design Journal and a Design Studies journal referee. Her sustainable design research, knowledge transfer and educational work have been acknowledged in a number of international and national reports and publications. She was recently acknowledged by Design Week as one Britain’s most influential sustainable design advocates. She has been an academic pioneer in this area for over fifteen years. Chick was the co-founder of the Centre for Sustainable Design. She has recently directed a number of funded research programmes and published in refereed journals, at international conferences and in books. During the past five years, she has raised funds for research and knowledge transfer projects worth over £1m.
Is teaching ‘design activism’ an appropriate response to the Sustainable Development imperative?
There has been little time or opportunity to map out more positive visions of what a sustainable world would look like...’ Jonathan Porritt, 2007 The author discusses how design education can set out to address this agenda through ‘design activism’, postulating a new political convergence around the twin concepts of sustainability and wellbeing in terms of opportunity and progress. The paper discusses the importance of design students engaging with this design activism ‘counter-narrative’ and developing clear ideas of its purpose and potential effectiveness.
