2012 Imperative Teach-in: Monday 12 October 2009, Victoria and Albert Museum, and online
There are a few remaining tickets for this event for students at £8.
However, you can get your institution to broadcast it live via the online feed! This needs to be set up in advance though…
for more information, and to get your institution involved, go to:
2012 Imperative Teach-in
Monday 12 October 2009, 10am-5pm
Victoria and Albert Museum
The 2012 Imperative Teach-in will be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Monday 12 October 2009, 10am-5pm.
Speakers include John Thackara, Andrew Simms, Jonathan Crinion, Stephanie Hankey, Richie Hawkins and Emma Dewberry. The event will be broadcast live on-line. The event will help students, faculty and staff confront critical contemporary issues; resource depletion, loss of biodiversity & especially the issue of climate change. The project will challenge institutions to use their resources and expertise to respond to environmental imperatives and work towards embedding ecological literacy in design education by 2012.
Design education must move quickly to respond to urgent environmental pressures. Climate change is a severe problem that will require a response from all sectors of society. Design education must embrace its unique ability to facilitate change by: engaging with the concept of ecological literacy, communicating key concepts of environmental sustainability, and initiating a wide-reaching social learning process. This review and re-focus of priorities within design education will help make design a key player in our collective response to global environmental imperatives.
The Teach-in will be a process whereby students and academics participate in a collective learning experience through the use of an on-line web broadcast. Teach-ins have a history in movements for social change from the 1960s and have recently been used to great effect by environmental educators. The 2012 Imperative Teach-in will create a platform for mass dissemination of information and the momentum to initiate institutional change.
Ecological literacy is an understanding of ecological systems and an awareness of how society operates within natural imperatives. Informed by an understanding of ecological systems, new concepts and tools can help the design industry become an important player in the transition to a sustainable system.
‘There is a tremendous gap between what is understood about climate change by
the scientific community and what is known by those who need to know, the public.
Nowhere is the need for knowledge greater than for people in design education,
who must be leaders in transforming the way that we use energy in daily life.’
James Hansen, Director: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, July 2009.