Page 98 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

In his introduction to Design Education for a Sustainable Future, published recently by

Routledge/Earthscan, Rob Fleming says his premise “is remarkably simple”. It is based on a series

of straightforward questions that seek to uncover the context, values, and behaviors necessary for

effective twenty-first century design education. Is society moving towards a new sustainable or

integral worldview, a new set of cultural values that are reshaping the very fabric of human

existence? If so, how are such profound shifts in consciousness impacting the way we interact and

design our lives socially? And how can ‘we’ as a societal members best design, educate and create

better institutions and interactions among us that reflect the zeitgeist of our new century by moving

from well-intentioned but lightweight ‘greening’ to the deeper and more impactful ideals of

sustainability and resilience? The process of answering these questions begins with the requisite

historical narrative which explores cultural evolution not as a slow and gradual rise in levels of

complexity but rather through a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in human consciousness that

today represent a whole new challenge to coalesce society towards co-creating a sustainable future.

The jump from dispersed Hunter Gatherer cultures to centralized agrarian societies and

then to industrialized nations “correlates well to the convergence of new energy sources and the

invention of new communication technologies” to a much talked about, much-overdue shift that

needs to take place in design education: Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic

Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis that “The convergence of

energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigures society and social roles and

relationships but also human consciousness itself.” This suggests the need for a coming together

in rationale aware dialogue that allows a complete open consideration of a panoramic global reality

and how living life itself is framed in our language and appears to us in various forms of media.

79