Creating nature awareness in design education

Abstract

In the current design practice designers mainly focus on nature as the strategy for sustainable product development and solving human problems. Nature provides wealty of the information sources that could be used to explore new usable information (systems, processes, organizations, functions, structure, form etc.) into design. So, the inspiration from a nature also referred to as bio-inspired and biomimicry design strategies is now becoming a widespread practice in design education. In this respect, the study searches the awareness of interior design students about 'nature', 'sustainability' and 'natureinspired design approaches' and place of those approaches in design education. In this study, two questionnaire forms made of open-ended questions have been applied on 100 students as pre-test and post-test before and after the 'Nature and Design' seminar. After the evaluation, it has been realized that awarenesses of the students, who don't have too much information about the subject initially, have improved and their aspects in reflecting the nature knowledge to design and the education process have changed with the seminar focused on 'how the nature works' and 'design approaches'. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.