Creating tools for sustainable education. Merging disciplines & simplifying complexity - the case of the sustainable marketing canvas

Abstract

Sustainability topics are wicked problems: Complicated and inter-disciplinary in nature. For education and for lasting societal impact, the challenge is bridging what we know (theory) into what we can do (practice). Sustainable marketing, in particular, has this dilemma. Its theories are complex and its practice is missing a coherent, inter-disciplinary view and is amputated from “normal” marketing. This prevents the scalability of sustainable marketing action, which has influence on important societal dimensions like human health & dignity, the environment, sustainable profit and employment. The duty of marketing educators and practitioners is to stop this fragmentation so that sustainable marketing education can be demystified, structured and then scaled. A way to do that is to employ tools like models or frameworks. One such framework, The Sustainable Marketing Canvas, is briefly introduced as an example. Thereafter, the workshop participants will be encouraged, in the form of an interactive design-thinking process, to create sustainability sense-making tools for their students in their disciplines. At the end of the design sprints, each group will present their tool and pitch its usefulness to the group. The plenum will give feedback to each groups’ presented tools. In this workshop, we will seed our creativity through interdisciplinary perspectives with the goal of creating useful, scalable tools for sustainable education.