Mid Sweden University

Recently, there has been a wide interest in sustainability in design research (Bichler and Beier, 2016; Campbell, Douglas, MacDiarmid, 2016; Haug, 2016). In media, this phenomena is described as the "Greta Thunberg effect" (Watts, 2019). In the article “The Uninhabitable Earth” (Wallace-Wells, 2017) the author runs through a number of extreme climate possibilities, this is one of the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history and has spawned a fleet of commentary across the world.

Although, this topic has been noticed for a long time, even in 200 years ago scholars argued that the Earth's resources were limited (Jonsson, 2017). Despite insights from history, progress towards a sustainable society is slow (wwf, 2016). The designer and educator Papanek argued in 1985 that all design should have a function and thus be socially and ecologically aware. However, when the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ) was tasked by the Swedish government to conduct an evaluation of efforts by universities to promote sustainable development, the results show that only a quarter of the academic institutions meet the criteria set (Fors, Holmquist, Helldahl, Lundh, Öst, 2017). 

In this paper, we argue that higher education has a responsibility to pay attention to how sustainability can become more extensive in our educational practice. In accordance with Claudine (2017), we argue that good design applied to real world problems can lead to major improvements in lifestyle and living standards. Haug (2016) means that design education should apply a broader perspective to encourage design students’ to create sustainable solutions as well as engaging others.

At Mid Sweden University design students have worked with sustainability for many years. In their exam projects they identify sustainability problems related to UN global goals for sustainable development, creating design solutions grounded in real world problems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sustainability is expressed in exam projects, and what topics the students have worked with from a designer as author perspective, in order to share knowledge and contribute to socially sustainable shifts in society.

Methods used are visual content analysis and visualizations summarizing the results. The preliminary results indicate what sustainable issues the young population find most important and what design solutions the students develop and express in various ways, not only as artefacts, but as products of an investigation of the pluriverse (Escobar, 2018). This is turn, opens to a discussion of the many different cultures which are present in society. In the full paper we problemize this further.