Building a Sustainable Future with Technology

Understand the impacts of technology on the environment

The climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues we face, with technologies playing a huge part in the destruction of our natural environment. We need to take action and move towards more sustainable models for technology.

On this three-week course, you’ll discover critical approaches to technology and sustainability, understanding the role that technologies play within our lives and how it affects our natural environment.

By the end, you’ll learn to view technologies as part of a broader ecosystem of organic life – as tools with life cycles of their own that have a direct impact on our environment.

Explore feminist and decolonial practices

You’ll start by defining sustainability as you explore how community, government, and corporations take different approaches to sustainability.

Next, you’ll unpack exploitation and climate equity as you look to feminist and decolonial practices. Hearing from a variety of experts, you’ll gain a critical lens to explore the problems we face.

Investigate which sustainable practices meet your needs

To help implement sustainability in your everyday life, you’ll delve into different sustainability practices to explore which ones meet your needs.

Next, you’ll consider how you live with technology and experiment with a creative repurposing project of your own.

Explore sustainable investing

Finally, you’ll explore how the tech industry can manage production processes to work towards circular economies. You’ll also explore sustainable investing including within indigenous communities and using alternative materials.

Guided by the experts at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute and across industry, you’ll finish the course with the knowledge of the impacts of technology on the environment and how we can work together for a sustainable future.

This course is designed for anyone interested in the impact technologies are having on the planet, and what changes you can make as consumers or creators of technology.

It will be particularly useful for those in the creative industries, architecture and design agencies, the technology sector, small business owners, and students.

• Approaching technology and sustainability
• Welcome to the course
• Defining technologies
• Defining sustainability
• Technologies and ecosystems
• Looking at the impacts
• Wrapping up Week 1
• Being critical and taking action
• Current Initiatives
• Responsibility, accountability, action
• Critical Approaches
• Alternative Practices
• Wrapping up week 2
• Living differently with technologies
• Redefining expectations
• Rethinking materials
• The role of economies
• Living with technologies
• Final reflections