Using SDGs to Promote Change and Nurture Connectivity in an Undergraduate Design Module

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced by the United Nations in 2016 to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper examines the impact of integrating these goals within a design challenge, as part of a level 3 undergraduate degree module. Design Values, Issues and Ethics is an expansive module, aiming to broaden the students’ discipline focus and allow them to expand their learning within a new landscape. This module promotes the utilization of nature-based intelligences to establish solutions to a community’s basic need to survive and thrive. The SDGs were integrated through embedding them as part of a future-building scenario, supported by a series of exercises and seminars. Students were then asked to reflect on how the SDGs had impacted their design process, and to consider ethical and value dimensions. These reflections were used to analyse the effectiveness of the SDGs as key principles for an ethical design intention. Integrating the SDGs to the design curriculum has served to promote a connectivity of systems, that were largely separated prior to this pilot.