Fei He, Tengyue Yu
Against the backdrop of global sustainable development and China's "Dual Carbon" strategy, there is a growing societal demand for interdisciplinary, versatile sustainable design professionals possessing integrated cross-disciplinary capabilities. However, traditional sustainable design curricula often suffer from significant disciplinary silos, overly virtualized practical problem scenarios, and overly simplistic assessment methods, making them ill-suited to meet the evolving needs of talent development. Drawing on constructivism and project-based learning as its theoretical foundations, this study employs research methods—including questionnaire surveys and teaching case studies—to explore reforms in practical sustainable design education through a three-dimensional interdisciplinary framework integrating "Design + Environmental Science + Sociology." The teaching system is restructured across three dimensions: the restructuring of interdisciplinary course modules, shifting teaching objectives toward fostering systemic thinking, and establishing a dual-practice platform comprising "workshops + projects." Building upon this foundation, the study introduces an innovative project-driven teaching approach grounded in real-world challenges, alongside an AI-assisted iterative design teaching model. Practical implementation demonstrates that this approach effectively enhances students' systemic thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration skills, and some of the resulting design solutions have been successfully implemented in real-world contexts; however, it also highlights practical challenges, such as the difficulty of coordinating cross-departmental resources and the uneven disciplinary backgrounds of students. In response, this paper proposes several optimization pathways—namely, establishing a cross-institutional resource-sharing mechanism, reforming a diversified interdisciplinary assessment system, and expanding virtual, digital practice scenarios—aiming to provide a valuable reference for the reform of interdisciplinary practical sustainable design education in China.