Abstract:

Design will do well to have sustainability as the meta-objective of every design project.But concerns expressed in design discourse show that this is not so. Even though there are many approaches, techniques, metrics and indices for sustainability, it is not effectively integrated into design. It is the quest of this study to find the reasons why effective integration of sustainability into design does not happen. One of the major gaps found, was that
designerly ways of dealing with sustainability was missing. Adopting sustainability measures developed in other domains do not have great success in design. The premise therefore is that design is not responding to sustainability with its true nature. The larger purpose of this enquiry is therefore to align the ontological nature of design with the epistemology of sustainability. This alignment can be achieved through conjectures. Further, it is proposed that sustainability can be addressed effectively in the domain of design through Conjecture-Analysis Model for Sustainability (CAMS).
Conjectures are whole or partial design solutions, which have been implemented in previous instances. These solutions may come from the personal experience of the designer or from an external source. The conjectures further find application in new design situations. A
pragmatic view has therefore been taken to integrate sustainability conjectures in the C/A model. It was found that this model could be leveraged as a pedagogic tool to integrate sustainability conjectures in student design projects.
Use of conjectures is not new in design pedagogy, in fact the Conjecture/Analysis model, it has been argued, is more suitable for design. But the fact is that Conjecture analysis is not being used in a structured or usable form nor has been represented in a visual form as a model. Limited efforts are made in the direction of articulating C/A model, and its application in sustainability pedagogy is lacking. The overarching methodology is action research. The main purpose of action research is to improve practice through developing reliable procedures to guide students towards sustainability. This methodology has guided this study in two ways.
1. To develop the model progressively along the action research stages.
2. To use action research as theory in action by demonstrating that conjectures are the link between the theoretical constructs of design ontology and sustainability epistemology.

The research contributions are
1. Developing a model representation for pedagogy of Conjecture/Analysis for Sustainability (CAMS). It is essentially a model for converting unsustainability consequences into sustainability conjectures. It is proposed that this model should be used as a teaching-learning aid for sustainability.
2. To expand the vocabulary of conjectures by identifying typologies used in design process.

One of the main challenges facing the development of the model is to address not only environmental sustainability issues but include other aspects of sustainability such as social, cultural and lifestyle and consumption patterns. By doing this, the generalizability of the model increases to a wider range of design problems and has relevance to different design disciplines.