Teaching to Dexign Futures in China: A Vision for a Blended Learning Pedagogy to be Deployed at Scale

Many design educators are concerned with urgent problems such as sustainable development [1] and climate change [2]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report clearly states that rapid decarbonization is needed by year 2030 to avoid climate change catastrophe. Such planetary level problems impact people's everyday existence within the biosphere, and require short-term design action alignment with long-term vision goals. However, many design educators teach to design for increasingly shorter time horizons within consumerist worldviews (e.g., rapid-prototyping, agile, human-centered design). In this paper, we describe a course that teaches design students how to align short-term design to long-term timescales. We leverage Future Studies researchers' work on how to teach students greater agency within long-term timescale horizons [3]. We describe an effective and efficient blended learning design pedagogy (e.g., combining online and face-to-face learning activities) [4] to engage with new global challenges such as climate change and sustainability (e.g., [5], [6], [7]). Dexign Futures, is a required design studies course for all third-year undergraduate students in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. The term "dexign," refers to an experimental form of design that combines design thinking [8] with futures thinking [9]. Due to time constraints of student schedule, the course was taught as a blended learning course with half the time and three times as many students as a traditional design studio course. Students' first exposure to new materials was an online platform where they watched videos, answered questions, and received immediate correctness feedback. During in-class sessions we discussed homework questions and did interactive hands-on design exercises. Prior research established the efficacy and areas for improvement of the Dexign Futures course as taught at Carnegie Mellon University to 40-50 students each year [5, 6, 7]. We are exploring how to share the course at scale in China. We've identified four challenges in our plans: modular design, teaching professors and students, synthesizing content, and deploying a western learning platform in the Chinese internet.