Abstract
This paper introduces the first internship programme in University of Limerick (UL), Ireland, which is a part of two-year collaborative action research of four subsequent internships, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The research focuses on training novice designers for challenges and real-life complexities in addressing issues of sustainability through design. The internship aims to create the environment for interns to self-learn and experience tools and techniques for Circular Design and present the potential of these tools and techniques in real-life innovation processes. Through this internship, interns were able to experience real-life challenges of creating innovative design solutions to address issues of sustainability and to develop their practical approaches to overcome these challenges. The internship is structured to convey general design practice and design for sustainability competencies to the interns, while gathering their insights throughout this internship and providing directions for improvement in the following internships in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Spain, NHL University of Applied Sciences (NHL) in the Netherlands, and Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden.
Keywords
sustainability education, design education, action research, industry collaboration
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.515
Citation
Bakirlioğlu, Y., McMahon, M., de Eyto, A., and Rio, M. (2018) Training the Next Generation of Designers for a Sustainable Future: Action Research on the Circular Design Internship, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.515
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Training the Next Generation of Designers for a Sustainable Future: Action Research on the Circular Design Internship
This paper introduces the first internship programme in University of Limerick (UL), Ireland, which is a part of two-year collaborative action research of four subsequent internships, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The research focuses on training novice designers for challenges and real-life complexities in addressing issues of sustainability through design. The internship aims to create the environment for interns to self-learn and experience tools and techniques for Circular Design and present the potential of these tools and techniques in real-life innovation processes. Through this internship, interns were able to experience real-life challenges of creating innovative design solutions to address issues of sustainability and to develop their practical approaches to overcome these challenges. The internship is structured to convey general design practice and design for sustainability competencies to the interns, while gathering their insights throughout this internship and providing directions for improvement in the following internships in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Spain, NHL University of Applied Sciences (NHL) in the Netherlands, and Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden.