Swim or drown: Tossing 1st year students into the complexity pool

The sustainability challenges we face today as a society are complex, wicked problems. As designers, we are accustomed to fuzzy problem definitions and the iterative nature of problem solving. However, in education we are just beginning to apply systems thinking to actively explore the connections between particular products or services to larger systems views and sustainability goals. Teaching designers in that complexity from their first year of education might be daunting, but we propose it's necessary to prepare these students for the future requirements of their profession. This article describes our approach to teach sustainability for first year design engineering students. It was done within the frame of the Design Methodologies course, in the Design Engineering programme at Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, during fall 2021. Based on previous years' course structure, students were expected to do two projects, an intense one done in 3 four-hour sessions and another one lasting 12 weeks. This year, both projects have had a focus on sustainability, and students were asked to collect and clean used packaging and other secondary materials for some weeks, to use them for prototyping during the course. The experience was reviewed through analysing student project outcomes and complementing the findings with a student survey to collect their impressions. The article presents these results, comparing the projects from this year to previous years and other similar approaches to draw suggestions for future teaching.