About SEDE-FAN

As experiences are created by all individual consumers and users under various contexts, the nature how sustainable consumption experiences are made reflects the characteristics of the actors and their cultures and living contexts. Toward the common goal of sustainable consumption experiences, effective and efficient education methods and expertise can vary a lot in Finland and in Asia reflecting relevant characteristics.

The goal of this EDUCase Platform project entitled “Finland-Asia Network for Sustainable Experience Design Education” (SEDE-FAN) is to build the network of higher education institutes in Finland and in various countries in Asia so that successful efforts in Sustainable Experience Design education in Finland and in various countries in Asia can be shared. Also learnings acquired in not-so-successful trials in such educational endeavors can also be communicated. In this way, the knowledge and principles underpinning such educational methods and expertise can be collected, stored, exchanged, retrieved, reused and enhanced through SEDE-FAN.

Participating higher institutions offer diverse courses at undergraduate and graduate levels where the sustainable consumption and production issues are educated in the form of design projects. Such design project based learning efforts typically employ problem-based learning approaches through team-based projects. While the specific courses may have diverse detailed contexts of education, these courses will share the underlying method of design thinking in that human-centered problem solving method and mindset are transferred to students in possibility-focused and hypothesis-driven manner. The SEDE-FAN will provide a platform where various characteristics of actors and diverse contexts of respective regions are systematically represented and specific design methods can be analyzed and classified in a structured manner. This schema for context-based modeling will also provide practical tools for representing design activities utilized in respective design education approaches.

Activities will also be expanded to connect to venture and startup companies in sustainability as well as bigger companies so that sustainable experience design education knowledge and findings can be utilized in industry and also education efforts will properly reflect industry context. Some specific partners in Korea and China have already been identified while continued efforts will be made to identify relevant industry partners in all relevant target regions.