Environmental and Social Sustainability in Design Education: A Comparative Study between Brazil and Portugal
Supervisor: Natália Plentz
This work analyses the teaching of design for sustainability in Brazil, an emerging country, and in Portugal, a developed country, with the purpose of identifying the main contents and competences that must be developed in the scope of sustainability. It also aims to discover the main difficulties in implementing Sustainability Design teaching and possible ways to remedy them. The concern with the sustainability of manufactured and consumer products has grown in the last decades. In this context, designers play an important role in meeting the paradigm shifts that take place in society. Although research related to environmental and social sustainability has existed for many years, the inclusion of these themes in design education may be considered recent; and when one speaks of social design, the examples are even more scarce.
Main Objective
To compare Brazil and Portugal on the inclusion of environmental and social sustainability aspects in the teaching of design.
Specific Objective
- Understand how design professionals see sustainability in their practice and training;
- Analyse the current context of design education in the countries studied.
- Evaluate the insertion of sustainability in different universities in the countries studied.
- Identify barriers to design education for sustainability in the countries studied.
- Propose ways of inserting aspects of environmental and social sustainability into design education.