Design Ecologies

We welcome the first graduating class from Design Ecologies, a program that promotes design’s role in ecological processes, nurtures an artistic design mindset that cares for multiple forms of life and acknowledges humans’ interdependency with other species.

Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “Science-fiction is not predictive its descriptive.”* Both design and science fiction are descriptive practices in their helping us to understand the possibilities of futures to come. Products, services, and systems affect many lives, shape societies and their environments as they relate to users, production processes and the earth’s resources, something that requires great artistic, social, and ethical responsibility from the designer. The work of the students of Design Ecologies shows that while design is not predictive, it does help to point at more desirable futures for us to enable collectively.

This year’s graduating students have been exploring different topics using knowledge from different fields as they investigated issues through multifaceted lenses, synthetizing them as proposals of tangible artistic knowledge. In the Degree Exhibition, you will find works that have been exploring how to live in the transition that we are now facing; works that suggest solutions for drinking water using innovative technologies, alternative future funeral scenarios, explorations of regenerative processes, or projects suggesting closer relations to other species, to name a few. Work that in a pragmatic way investigate design ecologies and ecologies of design.

We proudly invite you to take part of the students’ work and their journeys.

* Foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness, 2017

Teachers in Design Ecologies