Conference Agenda

This conversation investigates Unlearning Design through lenses of relational practice, critical sustainability, and material ecology. Drawing from multiple disciplines including communication design, fashion design, architecture, more-than-human-centred design, industrial design, regenerative design, interaction design, technology design, and education, the panel addresses sustainability delay not as a lack of knowledge, but as a structural and pedagogical problem. While design discourse increasingly acknowledges planetary crises, design education largely perpetuates structures, assumptions, and methods that enable unsustainable practices. We propose that transformation requires not merely adding sustainability content, but questioning what design education is for and how it operates.

Fry reminds us that “we are not just designing things; we are designing futures” (Fry, 2018). If so, unlearning ways of unsustainability becomes a critical task: a process of questioning what design education teaches us to take for granted. Despite decades of sustainability discourse, design education has changed remarkably little. Sustainability often remains peripheral: an elective, a lecture, a keyword in program descriptions. Meanwhile, the underlying assumptions of design — linear progress, human-centered problem-solving, growth-oriented success, material extraction, and authorship — continue to be reproduced. As a result, design education risks sustaining the very conditions it claims to address. What assumptions constrain transformation? What structures must shift? What competencies matter? This conversation surfaces tensions, contradictions, and unresolved dilemmas that resist resolution in traditional paper formats, generating new research questions through structured dialogue.