Abstract
With the pressure of growing environmental problems, the world is changing, and so is the paradigm of design. Accordingly, the calls for change in design education are increasing throughout the literature day by day. As the designers of the future, students must be prepared for alternative scenarios. This paper provides insights into students’ learning outcomes and competencies related to repair and sustainability in the context of an assignment that integrates repair into design education. This assignment has been part of the master’s degree design course at Linköping University for the last 3 years. During these 3 years, 52 repair projects, including a diverse range of products, were developed. Aiming to find out the insights of this process, focus group sessions were conducted. As a result of these focus group sessions, 12 insights were developed, such as the concepts of brokenness, designed repair, and repair-worthy objects. Findings show that practices of repair constitute complex sites of learning, technical skill and knowledge which could enable novice designers to become competent in circular design. This paper is of value for design educators and researchers, especially those concerned with the repair and circular economy, as it can facilitate future attempts to further integrate circular strategies into design education.
Highlights
The current paradigm of product design education often serves the linear system and perpetuates a throw-away mentality
This paper is of value for design educators and researchers, especially those concerned with the repair and circular economy, as it can facilitate future attempts to further integrate circular strategies into design education
This paper provides insights into students’ learning outcomes and competencies related to repair and sustainability in the context of an assignment that integrates repair into design education
Summary
The current paradigm of product design education often serves the linear system and perpetuates a throw-away mentality. Designers play a significant role in mitigating today’s environmental problems [5], and in the transition towards a circular economy [6]. As the future designers, must be prepared for alternative scenarios and be equipped with the relevant knowledge to be able to deal with environmental issues. This need to solve this issue can be seen from the increasing calls for change in design education throughout the literature [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Courses, and projects exist that aim to incorporate sustainability and a circular economy into product design education [12,13,14,15]
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