Education as a transforming practice: designing together for complex, sustainable living

Our current education systems do not adequately support students to learn how to deal with complex challenges and to create together alternative practices aimed at sustainable futures. We have developed a design approach and repository for transforming practices (TP) in order to engage with the world in co-response-able ways. During the past 20 years, we have explored and transformed educational practices to enable situated, self-directed and lifelong learning. In this paper we explain our journey of transforming our education systems and how the 5 principles of TP have been guiding this process, i.e., complexity, situatedness, aesthetics, co- response-ability and co-development. We illustrate with examples from our own educational practices how TP can help transforming current education systems into corresponding lifelong learning practices that support designers and participants in designing for alternative complex, sustainable futures.