Development and Application of a Sustainable Design Rubric to Evaluate Student Abilities to Incorporate Sustainability into Capstone Design Projects

摘要

Sustainable development has emerged as a promising strategy for combating unsustainable patterns of population growth, resource consumption, poverty, and environmental degradation. The most widely accepted definition of sustainable development, published by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (UNWCED) in 1987, states that sustainable development is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". The Johannesburg Declaration, released after the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (UNWSSD), later proposed the three pillars of sustainable development to be economic development, social development, and environmental protection. While endorsing sustainability requires valuing all three dimensions, it has been suggested that the environmental dimension is often over-emphasized, while the less developed social dimension is underemphasized. Some authors have suggested that additional dimensions be added to the three-pillars conceptual framework, including temporal and institutional dimensions. Nevertheless, the dimensions of sustainability are complex and interrelated, and promoting sustainable development requires that tradeoffs between dimensions be simultaneously balanced.