A Design Educational Strategy for Scaling Up Climate Change Approaches in South Africa and Norway

This paper reflects on the crucial combination of design education and global fairness when it comes to addressing Climate Change in an effective way. It also reflects on the just as important feature of, some sort of, “fairness” to future generations. Arguably these two features could be at odds with, or at least be a challenge for, two very typical and espoused features in contemporary design education; i.e. its focus on present and local conditions. Underpinned by this tension, this paper discuss how two design schools, one in Global North and one in Global South, intend to scale up its present local approaches to more glocal ones, that also takes future generations into account. In doing so, the paper describe the schools’ attempts to nurture public democratic discourses by back-casting future scenarios to present day and scaling it up by using a special kind of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The paper is not conclusive but hopes to nurture a creative debate about issues being necessary in, and beyond, all strands of design.