Designing Sustainability for All

Designing Sustainability for All is the 3rd LeNS International Conference: 

a unique distributed worldwide event, for the first time held in 6 venues simultaneously.

The Conference will be hosted by Mexico City (Mexico), Curitiba (Brasil), Cape Town (South Africa), Bangalore (India), Beijing (China) and Milan (Italy). The conference will be held for 3 days (3-5 April 2019), and in each of the 6 venues it will be possible to listen to any of the presentations happening in the other ones.

Designing sustainability for All envisions a cosmopolitan approach by collecting and sharing contributions from and for all of the contexts: low, middle and high-income ones, from north, south, west and east of the world.

Designing sustainability for All is a call for contributions and actions to the whole world design community, i.e. design researchers, design educators and design practitioners.

 

The LeNS Conference is in fact one of the largest design international conferences for lecturers, researchers, professionals and relevant institutions and organizations. It has become a reference event where experts from all over the world get together to present and share their knowledge, projects, tools and visions to diffuse sustainability for all.

 

LeNS is more than a conference.

It is a meeting point for those who want to learn and share about design for sustainability with a multicultural, open and copyleft ethos. LeNS vision is to foster a new generation of designers (and design educators and researchers) capable to effectively face the challenge to envision, design and contribute to the transition towards the sustainable world for all.

AIM

The conference aims to be both visionary and pragmatic, and to stimulate new ways of thinking. 

The scope is to share the latest knowledge and experiences around the concept of sustainability for all. 

This will be achieved through cross-fertilizing a wide range of disciplines: 

predominantly design, but even engineering, economy, policy-making and sociology.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

The conference is targeted at academics, researchers and educators, 

as well as designers, engineers, businessmen, economists, policy-makers, representatives from governmental and 

non-governmental organizations. The event is envisaged as an interdisciplinary arena asking to 

all stakeholders to adopt the ethos of promoting all possible cross-fertilizing synergies and open learning-by-sharing processes. The conference will create a vibrant and forward-thinking environment, inviting to diffuse new knowledge and 

share practices and experiences in the ever-increasing need to enable access to sustainability for all.

THEMES

We are looking for papers presenting, analysing and discussing:

1.

new theoretical considerations and contributions on the role of design and 

other disciplines in the transition towards a Sustainability for All society.

2.

new approaches, strategies, methods and tools to effectivelly enable development,

 implementation, diffusion and dissemination of Sustainability for All.

3.

experiences, concrete solutions and artefacts designed and developed as results of research activities, implemented courses/workshops/seminars on Sustainability for All development and diffusion; 

activities by designers, companies, institutions, communities, etc.

4.

new Sustainability for All development and diffusion of education strategies and curricula.

Contributions may discuss either Design Research for Sustainability (R.DfS), Design Education for Sustainability (E.DfS), Design Practice for Sustainability (P.DfS), and Design for Sustainability in-between Research, Education and Practise (REP.DfS).

We welcome works addressing any of the following topics:

  • Design for Sustainable Materials and Energy
  • Product Design for Sustainability
  • Product-Service System Design for Sustainability
  • Design for Sustainable Distributed Economies
  • Design for Sustainable Social Innovation and Behaviour Change
  • Design for Circular Economy
  • Design for Sustainable business models
  • Design for Sustainable Indigenous Practices and Informal Economies
  • Design for Sustainable Policies and Administrative support systems for Sustainability
  • ......

Conference Schedule:

3rd April 2019
  • Opening 
  • 2 Keynote Speeches
  • 12 Parallel sections (local and worldwide)
  • Locally-based Workshop
  • Multi-local Workshop
  • Poster session
  • Exhibition opening
4th April 2019
  • 2 Keynote Speeches 
  • 12 Parallel sections (local and worldwide) 
  • Locally-based Workshop
  • Multi-local Workshop
  • Poster session
5th April 2019
  • 2 Keynote Speaches 
  • 12 Parallel sections (local and worldwide) 
  • Locally-based Workshop
  • Multi-local Workshop
  • Closing and LeNS manifesto signing

         Endorsement: