Assessment of Sustainable Design: The Significance of Absence

Abstract

Although the technical aspects of sustainable design may be included in design education, the shaping of the student into an ethical and moral practitioner is seldom explicitly communicated. This paper aims to highlight an absence identified when the data from a design assessment case study was considered in relation to the literature on sustainable design. Using Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) the study set out to identify what kind of knowledge and what kind of knowers are valued in graphic design assessment practice. While the researchers anticipated that concepts on sustainable design might be identified in the knowledge and knower valued in design education, what emerged was a marked absence of explicit references to how the curriculum aims to cultivate ethical and moral design practitioners. This conceptual paper discusses the implications of such an absence and the challenges of designing curricula, pedagogies and assessment methods to shape the designer’s dispositions.

Keywords:

• assessment
• sustainable design
• design education
• sustainable assessment
• Legitimation Code Theory (LCT)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Giloi

Susan Giloi is currently the Chief Academic Officer at Inscape Education Group and the current President of the Design Education Forum of Southern Africa (DEFSA).

Lynn Quinn

Lynn Quinn is an associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University in South Africa. Her research interests include academic staff development and developers, curriculum, assessment and quality.