The Elevator Pitch
Sustainable Systems builds the capacity for students to actually feel capable of implementing sustainable practices and concepts in their work — and to to become responsible for the long-term, systems impact of the work they create. The course also helps to foster curiosity and personal agency in students as they consider what it might mean to become an artist and designer during a time of massive environmental change.
Official Course Description
From the Course Catalogue
Anything we extract from the earth must ultimately go back into it. This course aims to create an emotional and intellectual connection with the life forms and environments which bear the burden of our choices. How can designers, artists and strategic thinkers create products, systems and services that are socially, environmentally and economically sustainable? Sustainable Systems is structured around four major themes: Climate Change, Materials, Energy, and Water. We explore these environmental issues as complex and interrelated topics. Understanding them can help us address current social and justice issues in new ways. In this course you will study real conditions that are both local and global. Class activities will combine field trips, lectures, discussion, studio-based workshops, lab experiments and seminars. Fieldwork and applied research methods will be developed into creative works that address diversity, adaptability and resilience in the face of ever changing conditions.
How One Instructor Describes This Course
“Sustainable Systems introduces students to concepts and practices designed to empower them to take more informed, sustainable action in their daily life as citizens, as well as in their roles as artists and designers. Over fifteen weeks, students learn how their actions set in motion systematic material impact in the world. Conversely, they also see that as designers they have great agency to shape the trajectory of global environmental change through their own creative work. Also paramount to the course is the necessary contemplation of how deeply entangled one’s life and practices are with issues of social and environmental justice (i.e. one’s impact on other human and non-human life).
-Jamie Kruse
Week by Week Layout and Project Examples
The semester is commonly staged in two parts, bridged by a course-wide gathering during week eight where students meet for a shared experience.
The First Half of the Semester – Weeks 1 through 8
The first seven weeks are focused on introducing students to concepts and practices related to sustainable design and contemporary issues of social and environmental justice. This half of the semester also includes an introduction to core vocabulary related to climate change and human responsibility for this change, a time period now referred to as the Anthropocene.
The Second Half of the Semester – Weeks 9 through 15
The final six weeks of the course are typically a series of studio sessions during which students begin to apply the concepts and practices from the first half of the semester, drafting towards a final project. This studio work is supplemented by field trips, screenings, additional EA projects, and guest speakers. In-class work sessions include testing materials for final projects, drafting design briefs, systems maps, peer to peer feedback, and support for producing thoughtfully composed documentation of their own work.
*Project examples typically follow the order below, but each instructor may adjust this accordingly.*
Repair into Resiliency Projects
Weeks 1 – 3
Students choose an object to creatively repair with the option of bringing it back to its original functionality, or they transform an object or material that would ordinarily be discarded into something entirely new or different. This latter act creates new, usable functionalities.
Brian Liu
*Click on images to expand; hover over image to stop slide advancement
Natural Pigments
Weeks 3 – 5
Students are required to conduct two “Experience/Analysis” projects during the semester, and usually at least one happens during the first half of the semester. Experience/Analysis projects are determined by individual faculty, including: kombucha leather, natural dye, natural pigments, mycelium, and biomaterials.
In this case, students use organic materials left over from a meal or sourced locally to create natural watercolor pigments. They then take any leftover material to a local compost site, creating a zero-waste project.
System Mapping
Weeks 4 – 6
Students are also introduced to the topic of systems thinking and mapping during the first half of the semester.
Here we focus on the process of visually expressing the various interacting systems (such as air, water, materials, energy, labor, geographic locations, and transportation/shipping etc.) which are involved in supporting a specific object or student project.
Shared Experience
Week 8
Week eight is a pivotal moment in the semester when all sections of Systems come together for a shared experience.
Historically, week 8 has included a visit to the United Nations, Circle Line trips, or a multi-day online symposium featuring specialists in the field of sustainable art, design, indigenous knowledge, and/or urban resilience.
Field Trip
Field Action example
Weeks 11 – 13
Classes also participate in at least two field trips each semester, typically to NYC-based organizations focused on sustainability, such as the SMR recycling facility in Brooklyn, Freshkills, the Lower East Side ecology center, sustainability tours of the UC, Fabscrap, trips to community or botanic gardens (to view native plants), or other relevant outdoor public art projects related to the environment or environmental design.
In this instance, students visited two DSNY facilities. The Dattner Architect designed Spring Street Salt shed, which houses the salt deployed by DSNY during the winter, and Garage 1-2-5. During the tour students received a first-hand account of what happens to garbage after it leaves their homes in NYC from the DSNY workers who handle solid waste in the city. The tour includes considerations of the burden placed upon certain populations and geographies in NYC, as well as the global impact of waste.
Long Life Design
Weeks 9 – 14
This is typically the final project of the semester. Based on their skills and interests, students choose a practice or action they can enact on a regular basis, or they create an object/design they can use, care for and/or continuously adapt, for a minimum of 10 years.
The project components, supporting materials and documentation are slowly built and tested during weeks 9-13.
Field Notebooks
Practices of Slow Observation
Field Notebook work is conducted throughout the semester, 3-5 times, usually starting week 2 and ending by week 13
Students conduct field-based observations of local, outdoor locations, spending 20-30 minutes pausing at the site. A series of prompts are offered, including free-writing, noting sounds, light/shadow, and data-collection related to air quality, temperature, wind-speed etc.
Students document the site through sketching and photography, and revisit the site throughout the semester to observe changes in weather, built-environment, plants and season.
What Students Take With Them When They Leave
“After this course students move into their second year with a skill set that allows them to source materials with an awareness of their social and environmental impact. It also provides them with the knowledge needed to continue developing their own sustainable materials if they so choose. EA (experience/analysis) modules and systems mapping projects enable students to apply concepts of systems thinking to their later studies. These projects also provide them with a baseline vocabulary for discussing critical issues related to sustainable art and design. After taking this course, students are able to move into their future studies with an awareness of contemporary practices of sustainable design as well as with a knowledge of artists/designers currently working in the field.
The Sustainable Systems course teaches students that approaching their creative work through the lens of sustainability doesn’t have to be a limitation — it is instead an opportunity. Students are inspired by the fact that they are part of an ever-increasing cohort of incredibly successful international artists and designers, all of whom are creatively and ethically fulfilled by their commitment to sustainable design.”
-Jamie Kruse