Over the years, the standard Indian school curriculum has increasingly marginalised arts, crafts, and design education. This has led to the neglect of interdisciplinary approaches and creative problem-solving skills, which are essential not only in professional fields but also in everyday life. The influence of Western science and technology on design education, along with the shift from local to global perspectives, has also impacted the preservation of indigenous handcrafts, cultural diversity, traditional knowledge systems, identities, and natural resources in craft-rich communities.

As the built environment continues to evolve in response to global and local challenges, design education must prepare students to envision and shape sustainable futures. This paper explores how student-centred design education advances social sustainability by fostering critical engagement with the spaces students inhabit and design. Using Project-Based Learning as a framework, we discuss a series of pedagogical projects implemented at various levels of an interior design curriculum. These projects empowered students to reflect on their own lived experiences of built spaces, using these insights as a primary design driver rather than relying solely on external references.

The 2020 South African Presidential Commission on the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) presented five development pillars for the South African 4IR strategy, with the People and Skills pillar emphasising the role of the education sector in South Africa’s successful global participation in the 4IR. The report identifies a lack of soft skills such as creativity and problem solving in new graduates, adversely affecting their work-preparedness and employability. The World Economic Forum’s 15 top skills for 2025 also placed soft skills as the top six future workplace skills. Tertiary educators have the opportunity and responsibility to prepare graduates for this shift to the 4IR-workplace by developing soft skills relevant to their discipline.