Futures oriented design pedagogy: Performing a space of powerful possibility

Where is the futuring power in performative design pedagogy? How do we, as educators and researchers, engage with pedagogical approaches in design learning that are flexible and responsive to changing times? These are questions we ask relating to an experimental teaching project that took students into a space for learning possibilities within the context of a creative desert festival. Our pedagogical impulse had been to firstly relocate design students and educators into a space where the environmental extremes would be experientially immersive, so as to bring their social ecology in step with the environmental ecology. Secondly, it had been to situate the design learning activity within a sociocultural microcosm over a week, where embodied, performative engagement with all participants would provide feedback and give momentum to the groups praxis – through lived reflection in, and on their actions. We refer to performance in design pedagogy as imaginative meaning-making performatively produced. Our findings suggest that pedagogy that is enabling of performative event spaces in radically different settings, can expose and empower ontological relations between design students and their co-created world and hopefully prepare them to become power-ful actors in design futuring.

Keywords: Learning spaces, design pedagogy and power relations, deterritorialisation, performativity, sustainable futures, climate change.