Raising Sustainability Consciousness: A Call to Action for the PATT Community

Abstract

Following a funded research initiation project, The Blindspot Declaration (2025) was developed by a multidisciplinary group of academics in response to educational concerns about the acknowledgement of technologies in sustainability discourse and vice versa.  One of the Declaration’s key concerns relates to technology blindness – around how technologies are intricate to our lives yet remain unproblematised and largely in the background of our worlds.

This paper reports on foundational work leading to the project, beginning with an overview of global sustainability conditions and followed by a brief overview of literature from both technology education and sustainability education. These analyses informed the development of the Declaration and prompted the authors to also reviewing how the PATT community has engaged with sustainability issues over time by investigating proceedings from PATT between 2003-2025. The paper outlines the main findings and concludes by presenting the Declaration’s call to action as a point of reflection for raising sustainability consciousness within the PATT context.