Design schools as agents of (sustainable) change

To educate someone to be a designer involves increasing his/her skills in conceiving and developing design proposals (from general visions to specific solutions) for a better world. The majority of these proposals, can be seen as didactic exercises that usually end-up in the teacher‘s archives and computer files. This generates an extensive amount of unused design work as well as a waste of students‘ and teachers‘ creativity, enthusiasm and expertise. In the past, this waste was, or was considered to be, inevitable. Today, in the transition towards sustainability, facing the present demand for visions and solutions (Manzini, 2009) and given the on-going changes in the design processes (Leadbeater, 2008), this waste can be avoided: design school results and design student capabilities can become more socially effective and contribute to the solutions of the complex problems of contemporary society. How can it happen? To answer this question we must consider the emerging scenario where open source (Mulgan, Steinberg, Salem, 2005) and peer-to-peer approaches (Bauwens, 2007) make possible new organizational framework and design networks: open and collaborative design processes where design schools can play an important role (DESIS, 2011).
In the emerging scenario, therefore, design schools, with their tremendous potential of students‘ enthusiasm and teachers‘ experience, represent a social resource: a potentially powerful and useful player in the transition towards sustainability.

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