Background
The majority of the design methodologies taught at technology design programmes in higher education are geared towards humans. We teach human and user centred design, user experience design, participatory design and so on, but what about more-than-human stakeholders and their values?
What if the mountains or rivers were treated as stakeholders, or forests and trees, birds, and bees, or even a virus, which is probably one of the most prominent stakeholders in the years 2020-2022. Or what if intelligent systems, and AI become co-designers proposing alternative solutions and designs? How can we learn to listen to the voices and values of our more-than-human companions?
As stated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2015), to achieve sustainable development we need to address the three levels: people (society), profit (economy), and planet (biosphere) since they are all intertwined. A more-than-human design approach also encompasses planetary perspectives, and our shared planet and all the living organisms and communities that depend on it are put at the centre of the design process. Acquiring the skills to design for not only human but also more-than-human, eco-social values will be crucial for future generations of practitioners in their strive to achieve sustainable development.
Up to now, the technology design community also including design education has had a tendency to incorporate the values of people and profit, but not as much the planet and our entanglement with complex social-ecological-technological systems. The MOVA project contributes to closing the gap by providing educational resources that address the planetary level including more-than-human values and stakeholders.
Objectives
The overarching objective of the MOVA project is to develop educational resources that supports teachers to create conditions for students to grow into responsible designers by taking more-than-human values into account throughout the design process.
More specifically, MOVA aims to achieve the following objectives:
1. Build an understanding of the current state of innovative and best practices on designing for more-than-human values.
2. Provide teachers at technology design programmes in higher education with innovative educational resources for teaching students and future practitioners in how to design for more-than-human values.
3. Share the educational resources on teaching for more-than-human values in design as an open educational resource (OER).
4. Disseminate the results of the project to professional networks to foster cross-cultural dialogues and increased capacity to teach for more-than-human values in technology design education to achieve sustainable development.
Methods
The development process of the educational resources will combine teaching practice with desk research, educational design process, pedagogical design pattern development and peer-review process to secure research-grounded, method-driven, and quality-assured outcomes. Particularly, for the underlying and guiding development process methodology, a three-phased model for conducting educational design research is followed, based on phase 1) exploration and analysis, phase 2) design and construction, and phase 3) evaluation and reflection.
A modification of the pedagogical design pattern method (Goodyear, 2005; Nørgård et al., 2019, 2022; Köppe et al., 2018; Laurillard, 2012) is applied. The method is a systematic educational development method aimed at capturing “best practice” from research and practice, which are then translated into concrete learning and teaching activities within a specific domain; here teaching for more-than-human values in design.
Results
The expected main result of the project is a set of innovative and validated educational resources published as an open educational resource (OER) on teaching for more-than-human values in design. The direct target group of the OER is teachers – heads of programmes at technology design programmes in higher education, such as interaction design, computer science, technology-enhanced learning, educational technology, and industrial and product design. The indirect target group is students who through the teachers’ adoption and use of the educational resources will obtain the skills and competencies to design for more-than-human values and through that become responsible designers of tomorrow’s technologies.
References
Goodyear, P. (2005). Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern languages and design practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 21(1).
Köppe, C., Kohls, C., Pedersen, A. Y., Nørgård, R. T., and Inventado, P. S. (2018). Hybrid Collaboration Patterns. PLoP ’18: Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14.
Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. London, UK: Routledge.
Nørgård, R. T. (2022). Students’ academic digital competencies in higher education – development of a cross-institutional model. In Bennett, S., Sharpe R., and Varga-Atkins, T. (Eds.), Handbook for Digital Higher Education. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Nørgård, R. T., Mor, Y., and Bengtsen, S. S. E. (2019). Networked learning in, for, and with the world. In A. Littlejohn, J. Jaldemark, E. Vrieling-Teunter, and F. Nijland (Eds.), Networked professional learning: emerging and equitable discourses for professional development. New York: Springer, Research in Networked Learning.
United Nations Foundation (UN) (2015). Sustainable development goals. Retrieved on 2022-10-05 from https://unfoundation.org/