The good news is that the campaign 'Ecological Literacy in Design Education' has been reached its target! I will now have enough to pay expenses for my travels and accommodation to Oslo next month to present the paper at the DRS/CUMULUS 2013 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers. When I am there I will be making a concerted effort to convince the design education community to embed ecological literacy in the curriculum at universities around the world.
Meanwhile, the Design Research Society has agreed to wave my conference fees in exchange for a review of the event. This review will offer another opportunity to engage the community with sustainability imperatives. Please look out for it on my blog.
An interesting byproduct of this campaign is that the paper for the conference has already been downloaded 600x (in two months since it was uploaded) on the EcoLabs website and viewed another 266x on Academic.edu. Obviously, not everyone who reads a paper will agree, but it is a good start in any case. The paper can be accessed via the blog: https://ecolabsblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ecolabs-at-drs-cumulus-2013-2nd-int-conference-for-design-education-researchers/ I will also publish the review there and tweet highlights on @ecolabs.
BIG THANKS to everyone who made it happen! On Twitter you are: @Ian_Willey @blindspotting @hugh_knowles @karinjaschke @sDesignLabs @paul_chandlerUK @sorafferty and @jenboehnert. Some of you are not on Twitter (as far as I can tell) and you are Richard Owen Frost, Prof. Gregory Stock, Jonathan Crinion, Joel Davis, Ali Hodgson, Chris Kitchen and a few Anonymous contributors. Thanks one and all! Some of you will be getting posters and other perks in the mail over the next few weeks.
I am also sorry that I have to even ask for your support. If we lived in a world where sustainability education was a priority in design, I would not have to run a crowd funding campaign to attend a conference (and I would be paid a wage for the work I am doing). Fortunately, since starting this campaign I have been offered a visiting fellowship at CIRES in Colorado. This new work will take my focus out of design education for a year. I would very much like to come back when I finish. I see design education as a powerful leverage point for social change in response to sustainability imperatives. Thank you all, once again for your help and please stay in touch and feel free to send me any questions or concerns.
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