Auditing Sustainability Competency Visibility and Assessment Alignment in Industrial Design Education: A Document-Based Curriculum Mapping Study

Higher education programs are increasingly expected to show not only where sustainability appears in the curriculum, but also how it is sequenced, assessed and monitored. This study develops and applies a document-based curriculum audit for tracing documentary evidence of sustainability-related learning opportunities in undergraduate industrial design education. The data source was the publicly available 2025–2026 module handbook and course-information documentation of the Bachelor of Industrial Design program at Istanbul Aydın University, Türkiye. The study examines planned-curriculum documentation only; it does not evaluate enacted teaching practice, actual assessment practice, student performance or demonstrated learning outcomes. Ninety-five unique course-unit records were analyzed through directed qualitative content analysis and curriculum mapping. The audit examined course aims, content, contribution to professional education, learning outcomes, weekly topics, program-outcome links, assessment mechanisms and ECTS workload. Seven audit categories were used to distinguish direct sustainability evidence from disciplinary carrier evidence in areas including material literacy, production and manufacturability, resource and energy awareness, user-centered and inclusive design, digital and technological competence, and critical–cultural and ethical awareness. One additional documentation category recorded the availability of general assessment and workload information without treating it as sustainability-specific assessment evidence. The findings show documented visibility of sustainability-related learning opportunities across studio, material-production, digital, ergonomic, theory–culture and supportive curriculum components. However, explicit sustainability-specific assessment criteria were not visible in formal assessment descriptors. The study contributes a replicable audit procedure for distinguishing documented competency visibility, disciplinary carrier evidence and sustainability-specific assessment alignment, and supports curriculum-level monitoring for education for sustainable development in higher education.