ABSTRACT
How much social and ecological responsibility should designers be given in the 21st century? This was a question we asked ourselves in 1989 when we launched our ambitious design degree, ‘Total Design’ – now called, more modestly, ‘BA (Hons) Design’ – at Goldsmiths, University of London. In seeking to take the moral high ground, we wanted designers to see the bigger picture. This was a risky strategy. Instead of giving students the requisite design skills, we discussed ethical and environmental issues, all the time. We broke many taboos and got away with it. ‘Your students will never get jobs,’ one expert warned us. But we were on to something. Indeed, the course received top rating in a recent UK Student Union employability poll.1 Our first masters degree, MA Design Futures, adopted a similar approach, except that it brought together students from a wide variety of specialist practices and cultures. We hadn’t seen all these processes as research, but they probably became the intellectual foundation for our subsequent research into metadesign, one of the Designing for the 21st Century Initiative projects. Three of the key researchers in our team, Hannah Jones, Anette Lundebye and Mathilda Tham, were Design Futures graduates. Each, in different ways, had a strong interest in ethical and environmental issues. Together with two other lecturers, John Backwell and Julia Lockheart, and under the watchful eye of our administrator, Ann Schlachter, we gradually grew together as a research team. This process was achieved with the help of co-authorship tools provided by Jonny Bradley, our Wiki website programmer.
