Participatory service design and community involvement in designing future-ready sustainable learning landscapes

Abstract

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) work as a new agenda for sustainable development globally. Many if not most of the SDGs can be combined with different levels of education. This paper leans on previous work in Sustainable Education Design (SED), which looked at sustainability from its multifaceted angles with a broad global scope. The context of the study is a campus at a research-intensive Finnish university. The methodology entailed participatory service design approaches. For piloting, one classroom was chosen as a test bed. The data consist of workshops, use walks and structured interviews. The analysis started from identifying KPIs of sustainable learning environment creation, after which these were tested against Sustainable Education Design Criteria described in a manual book earlier. The key findings include nine preliminary alternative KPIs that were merged with previous SED criteria and related SDGs. The alternative KPIs were trialled in the test bed environment. These proposed alternative KPIs can be used as indicators for sustainability, innovation and learning during participatory change processes and in evaluating the outcome.