Introduction

As a design student in the UK in the late 1980s through to the late 1990s, I experienced many turns in design education. Towards the end of the 1980s, design was largely seen as something that could dramatically impact the corporate strategies and commercial performances of international companies such as Sony, Olivetti, Ford, and Philips. At this time, design was widely seen as a uniquely catalytic resource in a company's marketing strategy and new product development process. In short, design was seen as a key ingredient to a company's success in the global marketplace (Lorenz, 1987). The relationship between design, innovation, and commercial success has continued unabated since the 1980s with several design researchers and practitioners espousing design-led innovative ways to market success (Brown, 2009; Kelley, 2002; Myerson, 2001). In a more academic context, terms like “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross, 2011) and “design thinking” (Martin, 2009) became widely used to describe designers’ working methods and processes. In recent years, design has thus been seen as a widely applicable approach or way of working with a range of creative tools, methods, and techniques that can be used in a diverse range of contemporary issues. Elsewhere I have written about the “undisciplined” nature of global problems where issues are increasingly complex and interdependent and are not isolated to particular sectors or disciplines and how design education will need to be more “undisciplined” (not interdisciplinary) in its approach to these challenges (Rodgers and Bremner, 2013). This book, through eleven insightful chapters from authors based in six different countries, covers emerging practice and research in design education rooted in the age of the Anthropocene.