Aesthico sought to develop new approaches to incorporating sustainability in technological education. The complex entangled problems of climate crisis and its relation to technological development need to be rethought. We believed that transdisciplinary approaches were needed to reformulate relations between the arts, humanities, and sciences to bridge these divides in order to prepare a new generation of students for the new challenges of building the innovative, sustainable, circular economy of the 21st century. The project’s objective was to develop a framework for teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology in Technological Education to provide students with the transformative set of skills and competences needed to redefine sustainable technological development so that future technologists have concrete ethical contexts to address, and tackle, societal and ecological affairs. This aesthetic-ecological framework produced is made available to teachers as a modular toolkit with a teacher modular programme and a student modular programme for educators to deploy in a variety of pedagogical settings.
The project began from a belief that new approaches to technological education were needed to address the complex entangled problems of climate crisis and its relation to technological development. The wicked problems of the anthropocene require radical new, multi-faceted, transdisciplinary approaches that can provide the transformative set of skills and competencies needed to redefine sustainable technological development for the 21st century. We believe that developing ways of teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology can provide these skills and in doing transform technological education and redefine sustainable technological development.