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Paper Short Abstract:

The ‘Design for Change’ degree attempts to help students meet contemporary challenges with imagination and criticality. Considering education as a space of urgent action to help transition and regenerate environments and societies, the context and challenges of the programme are analysed.

Paper Abstract:

This paper considers a UK interdisciplinary postgraduate degree programme, ‘Design for Change’, which largely caters to those trained in the design disciplines (from textiles to industrial design, architecture to graphic design). It examines the attempts of the programme to meet social, environmental and technical contemporary challenges with imagination, methodological experimentation and critical engagement, and reflects on that which is (design) anthropological in them: from, say, a focus on the relational or the habitual, to the influence of writers such as Ursula Le Guin or Anna L. Tsing. In sync with the panel’s emphasis on exploring the role of design anthropology as a transdisciplinary future-oriented research field, the paper looks to how the education of design graduates can be understood as a space of research-informed pedagogy that is in itself helping to shape environments and societies (from spaces, relations and behaviours, to social systems, material cultures and technologies). Furthermore, it offers insight into the ways in which one group of educators and their students attempt to tackle wicked problems – intractable and not easily ‘solved’ – at a time of increasingly urgent emergencies (of climate, biodiversity, inequality) and what facilitating the design of alternative (environmental and just) futures can entail at this juncture. The paper considers how the work of students, teachers and community collaborators tries to grapple with the scale, temporality and impact of their actions and inactions, and finally turns to discuss the challenges and contradications of attempting to work this way within the neoliberal University.