Future living studio: Socio-technical experiments in sustainable design

Local creative community and design engineers are key stakeholders in initiating a local discourse on sustainability that includes considerations of production and consumption issues. The role of designers is increasingly changing to that of a strategic or facilitator role. Aligned with this global development, we developed Future Living Studio ...

From community resilience towards urban resilience: Exploring the grassroot initiatives' role in cities

Climate change and resource scarcity effects pose challenges by themselves. In the context of the complexity of cities, these challenges become wicked and ill-defined as e.g. socialeconomic issues are added. To face these challenges, a city’s resilience on multiple scales has to enable it to both mitigate the causes and adapt to the...

Partnerships for sustainable design in Vietnam: Leveraging culture and design

This paper discusses need and relevance of new local-global collaborations for sustainable design. Future Living Studio is a case study that explores how to enable cross-cultural collaboration in Vietnam towards addressing sustainable design and production issues. This paper presents the first empirical results of a diary study supplemented by...

Designers as change agents in emerging economies - An insider-outsider approach to collaborative product development with Vietnamese smes

This paper, written for the doctoral colloquium of IASDR 2011, calls for explicit consideration of ethics and culture in design for emerging economies. A theoretical framework combining collaborative stakeholder approaches with insider-outsider dialectics is proposed as a way to operationalize the ethical element of sustainable development...