Abstract
Description: The video addresses fundamental principles of sustainability education whilst focussing on the topic of particular transformational strategies. It was produced and initially broadcasted on the occasion of my participation in the LeNS World Distributed Conference »Designing Sustainability for All« that took place simultaneously in Mexico City/Mexico, Curitiba/Brazil, Cape Town/South Africa, Bangalore/India, Beijing/China and Milan/Italy from April 3-5, 2019. However, design and elaboration of the video were geared from the start towards a broader general public combined with the intention of its further use in suitable educational programs. Consequently, it has become published on Youtube where it is freely available.
Introduction: Re-directing human progress cannot be done by means of superior ethics and good will alone. Instead, effective forms of management and governance are required. Realizing sustainable development in practice takes place under highly diverse conditions of targeting-conflicts about priorities, utilization competences about resources as well as divergent interests and contrasting visions of how “our common future” should look like. Facing “great challenges” of humankind therefore means tailoring well-designed interventions in the ongoing dynamics of existing patterns: in communicative culture as well as in material culture, in the organizational sphere as well as in the technological sphere. But how to do so?
Three transformational strategies that are well known in sustainability science, science-technology-studies and systemic design are “efficiency”, “sufficiency” and “consistency”. They are driven by contrasting rationalities, respond to different groundings and favor distinct instruments. They are supported by different arguments and seem to be excluding each other, as suggested by the corresponding semantics of “hard” and “soft” sustainability. We can understand them as strategies that are competing for attention on the public agenda for being accepted and having the chance to become converted into practice. But how to combine these strategies with effective principles of design such as to enable far reaching transformations in material culture and social life?