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Susan's climate change project will involve equipping young people to collaboratively design their own communities through the process of co-design. The ecological challenges due to urbanization requires an unprecedented collaborative effort from architects, engineers, and landscape architects—a charrette of epic proportions. It's also an educational challenge for teachers to prepare youth for the future. The design solution lies not in buildings, energy efficient cars, or gadgets, but the redesign and re-imagining of a life.
Susan will conduct co-design training for youth so they may have the tools to engage other youth to storyboard a future that does not have to include carbon. She will teach them to facilitate dialogue with the tip of a felt pen. The collaborative dreams and sketches of like-minded youth will draw new ecologies.
Susan holds a B.Sc. in Biology, a B.Ed., and an M.Ed. in Science Education. She is a science teacher with the Vancouver Board of Education, an informal educator, member of the Camosun Bog Restoration Group, is affiliated with the Institute for Environmental Learning and the Pacific Spirit Park Society, and is a co-design artist with the Co-Design Group. Susan connects youth to their place by inviting them to visualize themselves as organisms co-designing a new ecosystem. Susan has twenty years experience as a science educator and as a co-design artist. In the past five years, Susan has integrated ecological education into Stanley King's co-design process so that youth may respond to climate change through the art of co-design.
In 2010, Susan received Architecture Canada's Foundation Bursary as coauthor of the Youth Manual for Sustainable Design (Stanley King and Susan Chung). For her work in youth engagement through co-design, she won the 2011 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Advocate for Architecture award. In 2013, she co-founded the Social Art of Architecture for Youth Society of British Columbia. In 2014, Growing Up Boulder used the Youth Manual to engage young people in design participation in Boulder, Colorado. Susan is also a nature interpreter who conducts teacher training for the Camosun Bog Restoration Group.