Sustain/Create

Last night I attended the first Sustain/Create event at AUT. Sustain/Create is a series of public discussions co-presented by the School of Art + Design and the ST PAUL St Gallery which aim to investigate the role of design in sustainability.

The event was was chaired by Rachel Brown of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) (@sustbusiness) and there was a stellar line up of speakers including Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy, Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan, Chris Mulcare and Sir Tamati Reedy.

Each speaker on had only 7 minutes to deliver their message and this made for a really punchy format. They all put forward seriously meaty ideas – it’s impossible for me to do any of the speakers justice but here is a summary of some of the bits that I managed to grab below (apologies if I have misrepresented anything -  apparently the gallery recorded all of it so will add a link when it becomes available).

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Co-design: some principles, theory and practice…

I recently had the pleasure of teaching a workshop on co-design techniques at UTS as part of their new Design Masters program. The term co-design refers to a range of things and is a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1]. The focus of this particular session was on techniques that you might use at the fuzzy-front end of the design process and included hands-on examples of the kinds of activities we might do as part of a co-design workshop. This post is a summary of the key messages on co-design covered as part of the session. (A second post will summarise the day and some of the questions from the students).  Continue reading…

Design in the wild: PDC’10 Presentation