Sustainability-Embedded Co-Design in Apparel Design Education: A Pedagogical Study

As future designers, apparel program graduates are expected to effectively address the complexities of a changing marketplace through the design process, including considering sustainability issues and incorporating user needs and preferences. Although co-design is often used to develop these competencies independently, limited research examines how it can be used as a studio-based pedagogical strategy to facilitate concurrent collaborative and sustainable design decision-making. Thus, this paper reports on a semester-long co-design project implemented in a studio course in which university students collaborated with elementary school students to create sustainable garments. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods survey design, findings indicate that participants developed greater awareness of design as an iterative and dialogic process, strengthened their attention to user needs, broadened their understanding of sustainability, and recognized professional relevance. The Sustainable Co-Design Learning Framework (S-CDLF) was developed through interpretive synthesis of the findings and offers a conceptual guide for future sustainability-embedded co-design pedagogical studies.