Preparing Future Designers for Climate Adaptation

Industrial designers in Indonesia should develop new viewpoints concerning industrial products, lifestyles and consumption habits, resources and creativity in view of climate adaptation. In the field of industrial design in Indonesia, sustainability issues started to attract attention in the early 1990s, but were brought up formally only in mid-2000, as part of the curriculum in higher education at the Faculty of Arts and Design, Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB). Given the fact that the ongoing curriculum at ITB still applies concepts of the conventional industrial era, this paper aims to conduct a general analysis of a course to prepare future designers for the current issues in the subject of sustainability, emphasizing the attempts to apply the principles of sustainability within the context of Indonesia, a developing, tropical country that is vulnerable to climate change. In this article, a SWOT analysis is laid out to evaluate the delivery of the subject and the organization of the curriculum. As a closing remark, it is suggested that an effective delivery of the subject should include exercises in real, local cases.