These thoughts are a little bit on the punk side, but informed by a great conversation with Neal Shasore and excellent projects like the Climate Museum , Ecological citizens Network, Black Mountains College , the Steps Collective, the Open School East 2 year programme , the work of Shannon Mattern, Schumacher Wild, the now defunct Design and Environment course at Goldsmiths and many others. This is the result of a couple of years of deep observation and thinking but there’s plenty more of that still to do.
Principle 1: make the curriculum deeply carbon literate
Stop teaching automative design and transportation without teaching urban design and talking about the impact on health and pollution. Stop talking about materials and manufacturing processes as if they were all on a level playing field in terms of carbon intensity and energy requirements. Stop students from submitting final projects using GenAI. Teach design for repair.
Principle 2: only groups graduate
Climate change is about learning how to work with others or convincing others to work with you. So there’s no reason why a curriculum shouldn’t gently introduce this and culminate in a group project. The beauty of collaboration is that it really teaches you lots of vital skills for climate work: compromise, humility, collective imagination and more. The hero’s journey is not a useful framework for this kind of work so the curriculum should reflect this.
Principle 3: environmental science and economics are not an option
Every climate project eventually has to face the inevitable questions: ‘how will we pay for this’ as well as ‘what will be the spillover effects on the environment of our project’ and I don’t think we can avoid equipping creative people with those skills and that knowledge.
I’d love to know what you think so please reach out if you’d like to talk about this.
The Low Carbon Design Institute 