I’ve been putting word out in a few different places about this upcoming “teach-in” for design students to learn about their responsibility, as they move into professional careers, to consider the planet and climate change unconditionally in their work. Hopefully some of the Climate commons readers will find this useful.

Ed Mazria is a committed pioneer on the frontier of climate-conscious building. His Architecture 2030 agenda has gained recognition this year as an exemplary model for pushing a rapid and radical shift towards better building strategies. Now, like many people who understand the immediacy of this problem, Mazria is aiming at the target with the greatest potential to turn this misguided ship around: students. Specifically, design students.

The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In is a free one-day event scheduled to be webcast on February 20, 2007, from noon to 3:30pm EST. The session aims to reach at least half a million students, faculty, deans and practicing professionals in North and South America, hopefully making one simultaneous splash that will send ripples of reconsideration and activism through the design community.

The teach-in is just one component of Mazria’s 2010 Imperative, which calls on design schools to reconfigure curriculum starting in 2007 such that it intrinsically factors disengagement from fossil fuel addiction into every design problem a student approaches. The website summarizes the 2010 mission like this:

To successfully impact global warming and world resource depletion, it is imperative that ecological literacy become a central tenet of design education. Yet today, the interdependent relationship between ecology and design is virtually absent in many professional curricula. To meet the immediate and future challenges facing our professions, a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today.

The 3-hour teach-in will include guest speakers Susan Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis Magazine, Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Chris Luebkeman, Director of Arup’s Global Foresight and Innovation Initiative, and of course, Ed Mazria.

Are you being trained for the world you will inherit?

-- SarahRich