no clear path

Sometimes I think I should have gone into a medical profession! Or into something like teaching. Learning how to work in one of those professions has a formula. You know what you need to learn and what you're going to learn and there is a definite end goal in sight.

Sustainable design has no formula for learning. None of us doing this degree have any idea where its going to take us when we finish in a year. Its a scary scary place! We come into this degree and think we know what sustainability is...but we don't. We have learned so much new stuff that our heads are going to explode! And the problem is there isn't much to see from what we have learned. Being that this area is so new there aren't always things to see that have happened. People have been working to open the doors of sustainability, but its been for the past twenty years, and even way beyond that. So those of us who are going into the world of sustainability have to now figure out what the hell we do with these open doors! What does it actually mean to be sustainable? how to we get average Joe to respond to this crisis? how can we make people see that its not just a trend that the world and future generations depend upon action? And how do we apply all this to our area of expertise in design? There's so many questions in this area that can't be answered but by just getting your hands dirty and doing it and hoping to God it doesn't fail! But I think in sustainability we are all going to fail, we are all going to come up against a lot people who don't understand what we are doing and who will "slap us around" as my prof put it so eloquently today. But we're also going to push the envelope of what design can do, of how design responds to people and what design means for people!

Somedays I still think though, wouldn't it have been nice to have gone into a degree where you more or less know what to expect! Where you're studying things that have been studied for decades and centuries? No one thinks a medical person is crazy or a teacher is super liberal hippy just out to save trees. And they can say oh I'm a teacher or oh I'm nurse and everyone know exactly what they are. When people ask me what I'm studying I say I'm in designing for sustainability and they just look at me and say oh thats nice. So I have to say you know the "green movement" thats kinda sorta a little bit of what we are doing. And they say oh so like recycling.

yeah. recycling. thats what we study.