Biomimicry education is grounded in a set of natural design principles common to every known lifeform on Earth. These Life’s Principles (LPs) (cc Biomimicry 3.8), provide guidelines for emulating sustainable strategies that are field-tested over nearly four billion years of evolution. This study evaluates an exercise for teaching LPs to interdisciplinary students at three universities, Arizona State University (ASU) in Phoenix, Arizona (USA), College of Charleston (CofC) in Charleston, South Carolina (USA) and The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) in The Hague (The Netherlands) during the spring 2021 semester. Students researched examples of both biological organisms and human designs exhibiting the LPs. We gauged the effectiveness of the exercise through a common rubric and a survey to discover ways to improve instruction and student understanding. Increased student success was found to be directly linked to introducing the LPs with illustrative examples, assigning an active search for examples as part of the exercise, and utilizing direct assessment feedback loops. Requiring students to highlight the specific terms of the LP sub-principles in each example is a suggested improvement to the instructions and rubric. An iterative, face-to-face, discussion-based teaching and learning approach helps overcome minor misunderstandings. Reiterating the LPs throughout the semester with opportunities for application will highlight the potential for incorporating LPs into students’ future sustainable design process. Stevens LL, Fehler M, Bidwell D, Singhal A, Baumeister D. Building from the Bottom Up: A Closer Look into the Teaching and Learning of Life’s Principles in Biomimicry Design Thinking Courses. Biomimetics. 2022; 7(1):25. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics7010025
It is becoming clear that the project management practice must embrace sustainability in order to develop into a 'true profession' (Silvius et al., 2012). In project management, sustainability can be gained in both the product of the project and in the process of delivering the product. (Gareis et al., 2010) Nine sustainability principles have been identified that should be implemented in the project management practice. These nine principles are: (1) values and ethics; (2) holistic approach; (3) long term view; (4) large scale; (5) risk reduction; (6) participation; (7) accountability; (8) transparency; (9) stakeholder interest. In a case study it is researched which project and program management roles can exert an influence to have the sustainability principles implemented in the project management practice and how they can accomplish this implementation.
From the article: "Abstract, technology-enhanced learning can be used to replicate existing teaching practices, supplement existing teaching or transform teaching and/or learning process and outcomes. Enhancing workplace learning, which is integrated into higher professional education, with technology, calls for designing such transformations. Although research is carried out into different kinds of technological solutions to enhance workplace learning, we do not know which principles should guide such designs. Therefore, we carried out an explorative, qualitative study and found two such design principles for the design of technology-enhanced workplace learning in higher professional education. In this research, we focused on the students' perspective, since they are the main users of such technology when they are learning at the workplace, as part of their study in becoming lifelong learning, competent professionals."
