D4S Paper

International conference on engineering and product design education

12-13 September 2019, Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management, University of Strathclyde, united kingdom

The Upcycling Studio: When sustainability researchers collaborate to teach the first-year students of design

Soumitri Varadarajan¹, Jessica Bird1, Michael Trudgeon², Emma Gerard¹, Chris Ryan² and Helen McLean¹

¹RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, ²University of Melbourne

Keywords: Design for Sustainability, Student Activists, Upcycling

ABSTRACT

This paper describes The Upcycling Studio, a program of study that required student teams to study sustainability and waste systems through design action. This teaching project intersected with the theoretical aspirations of a group of sustainability researchers who as collaborators over three decades, and having jointly navigated through the changing paradigms of sustainability discourse, wished to revisit the basics of design for sustainability in the contemporary period.

While we wanted to instil a passion for sustainability in students by giving them the experience of making a tangible impact, the teaching project had to reconcile three aspects that characterised the project of teaching first year on the topic of sustainability; the content, the nature of the student body and the digital agenda of online learning. The content challenge was to integrate the development of an activist stance, capability in environmental product design within a mass production context, and how to do sustainability within studio practice. In addition, the diversity of the large student cohort in first year spanned school-leavers and mature-age students at two ends of the spectrum, and so the program had to be flexible to accommodate the learning aspirations and learning styles of the diverse cohort. The mandatory inclusion of online learning and the need to demonstrate best practice in digital learning, as in the adoption of flipped classroom, was the final requirement.

The recent ban by China, of the import of Australian waste products destined for recycling industries in China provided the theme for engaging students in upcycling as a key way to undertake projects in sustainability. While upcycling is often a theme in projects undertaken by students, it is not explicitly a course topic in the first-year studio, where rather than explicitly teach a theoretical process of design, students made prototypes, and the theoretical process of design emerged as a practice of redesign of products. Designed to be run over a period of 5 years, the project has completed the first teaching year. This paper presents the pedagogical premises and the evaluation of the program conducted in the first year. The authors discuss the outcomes and the changes being implemented to improve the program.