Exploring life competences and green skills for 21st century designers

Project leader(s): Emma DewberryVera Hale
Theme: Other
Faculty: STEM
Status: Current
Dates: May 2025 to September 2025

This project aligns with current developments in the Open University to explore the relationship between Sustainability goals, curriculum design and opportunities for progressing employability outcomes. It strongly aligns with the OU 2022-2027 Strategy that highlights Sustainability as a key theme and explicitly responds to eSTEeM’s focus for this call in Curriculum design and assessment with a focus on embedding sustainability in curriculum design.

The project centres on the development of Stage 3 of the BDes (R63) qualification in this pre-production time window. It sets out to undertake a rigorous review of frameworks that address the embedding of sustainability within learning contexts to enhance individual learner capabilities and develop stronger outcomes that help define ‘green skills’ and competences for a 21^st Century society. It specifically looks at this issue through the lens of the design discipline to develop robust evidence to enable the scoping of ‘lifewide’ capabilities in ways that enable reflective practices in learning contexts, and outcomes that help evaluate employability assets informed by sustainability goals. We draw on sustainability learning and capabilities literature as a foundation for this project. We will gather primary data through expert interviews with Design sector leaders and in discussion with external advisors (E&I School Industrial Advisory Board).

We will include student inputs collated from the Responsible Futures Survey (2025) and also surveys OU students who volunteer to be part of the OU’s Designathon (Jan- April 2025) and Sustainathon (June 2025), two events developed by the OU Design Groups in collaboration with OU Career and Employability Services. We aim to deliver a robust review of lifewide competences and green skills that can be integrated within our design teaching and learning at the OU. Our ambition is to provide a framework for lifewide sustainability competencies that can generate external impact by uniquely contributing to the evolving debates on the purpose and value of higher education.