Course summary

Sustainability should be at the heart of everything we do as designers and is certainly at the heart of this course. Research suggests that you, as designers and problem-solvers of the future, make choices every day based on ethical awareness and environmental sustainability: the clothes you wear, the food you buy, the transport you use, the courses you study and the careers you intend to follow. The decisions you make now, as the generation with the greatest potential to have a meaningful impact, will influence all our futures for years to come. Sustainability is often an over-used term that saturates the media, corporate and political culture resulting in a sense of overwhelming powerlessness for the individual; what can you possibly do, how can you be expected to make a difference? Answer, we need your ideas; the world needs your ideas, big ideas, small ideas, better ideas, now more than ever before. Often the very best solutions to a problem are the simplest, the most straightforward and the easiest to put into action. On this course we want to help you to develop and apply your thinking, creativity, ambition and imagination so that all our futures will be bright. BA (Hons) Design for Sustainable Futures is about understanding how design happens, and how it can be used responsibly to create a more sustainable future. This course challenges you to look at societal issues and problems that require change; to investigate what you can do that will encourage positive change; to develop and design proposals for change and to reflect what the world might look like after this change. Alongside gaining the knowledge and skills needed for design and innovation, you’ll study different ways in which sustainability can be defined, understood and realised as well as the social, economic, cultural and political context of sustainability. You’ll develop a way of thinking about design and problem solving that leads to a rewarding career in the creative industries. Your specialism will be in using your creativity, ambition and imagination to propose the innovative concepts that will lead to positive changes in the future, changes that might be big or small but definitely changes that will make the future more sustainable. BA (Hons) Design for Sustainable Futures makes full use of all of AUB’s purpose-made design studios, digital & traditional workshops and the Innovation Studio. Alongside academics with a wide variety of design experience, technical staff are available to enable students to access and use all of AUB’s industry-leading resources. Well-equipped design studios are provided for guided and self-directed study. Our workshops are a thriving shared space where prototypes and experiments can come to life. Digital technologies like VR, AR, rapid prototyping and digitisation can be experienced alongside traditional workshop tools, drawing spaces and shared studios. After developing a way of thinking that will help you to understand the importance of creative thinking to the design process, you’ll explore aspects of sustainable and responsible design through a series of real-world, problem-based briefs. Upon graduation you will be prepared to change the world with your creativity, ambition and imagination.