THE ROLE OF BEHAVIOR FRAMING FACTORS IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION TO INSPIRE THE RESPONSIBLE ATTITUDE

Moving towards the goal of tackling global challenges and building a sustainable future requires active participation and responsibility of all professions including industrial designers. Design education plays a key role in this regard. Several papers have discussed the needed adjustments of design curricula to encourage more students to participate in sustainability matters, but the real change is determined by a wide range of factors at the same time, seldom regarded in existing debates. This study pursues the issue from a new perspective which enables one to consider more aspects simultaneously. It proposes that designers' activism and responsibility (which are defined in the paper as two dimensions of ethical design) could be regarded as two target behaviours which are guided by behaviour framing factors. Accordingly, behaviour models are reviewed and afterwards, change criteria are investigated more precisely through focus groups and a follow-up questionnaire with contribution of BA and MA industrial design students of three prime universities of Iran, all located in the capital, Tehran. The paper suggests a range of influencing factors which are better to be acknowledged in planning industrial design education in order to inspire more responsible attitude.