SRD Change: Showcasing graduate projects that provoke sustainable changes in design thinking and practice

Abstract

Every year since 2004, the Society for Responsible Design (SRD) in Sydney has been exhibiting graduate design projects which address issues of environmental change and responsibility, social equity and community ideas. This insightful exhibition, initially launched as ChangeX and now known as SRD Change, showcases exemplary graduate projects that inspire, provoke, and challenge conventional expectations of the design industry and businesses recently attuned to corporate responsibility. Works are selected from a diverse range of design disciplines across Sydney’s leading tertiary institutions. Design is reclaimed here as a tool for satisfying genuine human needs in ways that are both practical and imaginative, posing a compelling alternative to the contemporary (mis)use of design as an elitist, profit-driven enterprise fuelling unsustainable levels of consumption. Confirming the importance of higher education as an integral element to enabling meaningful change, SRD Change celebrates the culmination of a collaborative process, uniting the wisdom and knowledge of design educators, the working expertise of design professionals and the new creative enthusiasm of final year design graduates, through projects that promote fresh ways in which society can be made more sustainably aware and responsible. This paper reviews the SRD Change process, documents the highs and lows of the exhibitions, the value it provides to participant graduate designers, and its contributions in furthering design education for sustainability.