Transforming and prolonging design lifespans: design education cases for sustainability

2017-11-10
This paper aims to present an approach focusing on design education for sustainability through providing two exemplary cases from third-year industrial design projects. The main themes explored in these projects involve personalization via design transformation, adaption and upgrading during design, use and post-use phases. The first project developed and facilitated at Carleton University, the School of Industrial Design mainly addresses the key theme of transformation of LED lighting from indoors to outdoors during use phase for the adaptation of design solutions for diverse tasks (e.g. mood to therapy lighting, task to outdoor lighting etc.). Second educational project developed and facilitated at METU Department of Industrial Design, aims to develop design solutions for open kitchen platform enabling transformation and upgrading during design, use and post-use phases. For each case, users are considered as active participants in the design process. The first project was undertaken individually whereas for the second one, the design students worked in teams due to the complexity of the project scope and objectives. This paper outlines the main intentions, phases and outcomes of these educational projects through providing insights and suggestions from design educators' perspective. The illustrative student projects demonstrate some of the key principles and considerations being aimed throughout the phases of the projects. This paper also provides some future directions that can be implemented in further researches and educational projects.

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Citation Formats
Ç. Doğan, “Transforming and prolonging design lifespans: design education cases for sustainability,” 2017, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/43033.