Badke has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in sustainable design, critical design, culture and theory, design research, and design criticism, as well as both senior and introductory design studios. In addition to working as an educator and researcher in environmental and socially sustainable design, he have worked in residential and commercial design, project management, consulting, and product development.
Badke’s academic interests lie in the attributes design offers as a critical mode of inquiry and intervention. As a medium of exploration embedded within consumer culture, design inquiry offers unique opportunities for research in sustainability. Restructuring our relationships with material culture will necessarily require profound systemic economic and technological changes, but importantly it will also require the development of more considered approaches to everyday practices, for the way we construct our identities, develop meaningful relationships, and understand personal fulfillment and well-being. As an agent of creation for artifacts, symbols, systems, and interactions, design not only has a significant role to play in how we address and understand current concerns over the environment and the pressing contexts of our day, but also for the ever-renewing cyclical inquiry into what it is to be human in the built world.
