Design and the university : a partnership for sustainable design

![CDATA[In this paper we discuss the sustainable design opportunities that are arising from a shared agenda between design and the university. As international experience demonstrates, sustainable design remains largely theoretical, and has had great difficulty in achieving significant traction in education and practice (Findeli 2008). We are increasingly frustrated as sustainable design educators by the scarcity of examples of sustainable design practice—there are many examples of low impacting products, but few examples, especially in Australia, of commercially viable, real world sustainable design projects that achieve ‘systemic discontinuity’ in highly resource-consumptive lifestyles. We shall discuss how we have applied Tony Fry’s concept of ‘redirective practice’ (2009) to re-think the role of design in our particular university context. For Fry, design re-made is a meta-discipline, drawing together disparate knowledge under the ethical directive of ‘the sustainment’. We see design for sustainability as located at the project level, as an initiator and facilitator of a change process which is necessarily collaborative. We have brought this conception of design to the university’s sustainability agenda as, similarly to design, it is being called upon to take a leadership role in sustainability as it educates the graduates who will be determining the sustainability or not of our human systems. As a project field for sustainable design exploration the university is rich in expertise and its community and campuses provide ‘a microcosm for society’ (Cortese 2003:19). Whilst it has the know-how within its disparate academic disciplines, higher education ‘is generally organized into highly specialized areas of knowledge’ wherein cross-disciplinarily collaboration is a significant challenge (Cortese 2003:16). What we have found and are exploring in a range of projects that will be elaborated on in this paper, is that design as a meta-discipline provides i) the means to bridge these disciplinary gaps and ii) the action strategies necessary to initiate projects of lasting impact with high learning potential.]]