As the focus of product design has shifted from exclusively commercial to sustainability and social concerns, design education in this area has endeavoured to keep pace. Victor Papanek's book Design for the real world, crystallised many of the systemic social, economic and environmental concerns into an argument for change through eco-design, inclusive design and, in business and corporate contexts, a triple bottom line of social, environmental and economic factors. Simultaneously, design has developed and evolved participatory and co-design approaches, with high-profile consultancies such as IDEO proving that early involvement of designers with 'wicked' social and environmental problems is possible. This position paper revisits Papanek's agenda for industrial design, and examines the link with participatory approaches, and existing socially responsible design agendas and examples. Identifying eight critical features of socially sustainable product design, this paper suggests that Papanek's original agenda for socially responsible and sustainable design has been partly fulfilled and must be developed further through the changed role of the designer as facilitator of flexible design solutions that meet local needs and resources.

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Design has the potential to significantly improve safeness and wellbeing, and to identify and reduce risk either during the design phase or through targeted design interventions concerning product, infrastructure, systems, and services. The broad user-centred skills and technical knowledge base of designers allows for clear problem definition using ethnographic discovery processes, and creative design and innovative design resolution in a socio-technical context. As designers' transition from product dependent (and market driven) outcomes to fewer tangible activities, increasingly the role of design as an enabler of societal wellbeing, capable of making a greater contribution to communities and lifestyles, opens up new practice foci. Whilst design has always been required to address safety from a compliance and/or product liability perspective, 'Safeness by Design' aims to apply an explicit safeness lens to design practice. Aspirational in its intent, it seeks to operate outside of safety compliance frameworks; utilising human centred design, experience and interaction design, social design, and service design approaches, rather than risk management methodologies, to achieve actual or perceived safeness. This paper suggests Safeness by Design as a new design paradigm, examining the contribution of early works to safer urban contexts, and proposes a safeness-led approach to design practice.

It is proposed that a progressive Industrial Design education should focus on supporting students in learning to self-manage ambiguity and bolster their agile independence throughout the tentative undergraduate years of growth [1]. As the field of Industrial Design moves beyond its industrial manufacturing roots, exploration of curricula that anticipates contemporary issues such as decolonisation, diverse participation and complexity in creative innovation is still not prevalent in this contemporary period [2]. Such a context necessitates an accelerated disruption to traditional design pedagogical practices [3], as seen in the RMIT University Industrial Design programme My First Six Months (MF6M) -a first-year learner-centred initiative situated around capacity development, student agency, self-efficacy, and disruption of expectations about the power dynamics in learning and teaching. This paper outlines the adoption of the RMIT University, My First 6 Months (MF6M) first-year learnercentred pedagogical alignment into the 2 nd and 3 rd year vertically integrated studio environment, through the case study 'Safeness by Design (SbD)-Enabling an Ageing Workforce'a collaborative partnership with the Innovation Centre of WorkSafe Victoria, a state government safety regulatory body. In curating the studio's outcomes, it became evident that the embedded predispositions developed throughout their MF6M experience, activated the diversity of students' thinking and acting in situations resembling real-world design practice, which achieved our SbD studio's pedagogical ambitions. We found this model to be highly transferable, requiring less teaching staff intervention and giving more flexibility to students, by reinforcing notions of independence, trust and self-efficacy in learning. Students are scaffolded as they dynamically explore and frame their own inquiry questions and continue developing their professional identity throughout their studies. In doing so, the classroom is firmly situated as a safe and democratic creative space, whereby teaching staff adopt a coaching role to establish a collaborative partnership, to further support student capacity and confidence.