Project Abstract

I don’t know about you but I was mostly illiterate about the subject when I started this course. It is unbelievable how much I have learned reading just Cradle to Cradle and with the help of collective actions. I think education is vital as it is with everything as with sustainability too. My ideas about the project that I want to create find itself along these boundaries. Questions I am asking to myself:

• How can I build something that raise awareness about how we are ignorant about our living environment?
• How can I educate more people including me and put the information in a more sensible way so that people wouldn’t overwhelmed and contrary to that get interested intentionally?
• There are lots of great ideas in cradle to cradle that are needed to be shared to raise our interests in this subject. Could I find a way to put them in a practice if they are practices, or give people insight about them if they are information?

So starting through those questions I have come up with raw ideas:

• Building visualization systems changable in multiple languages that tells us the daily materials we are using and creating different lists that categorizes their harm etc. (I have found myself most of the time not familiar with the material names, so idea is to make people more educated about materials that are around us so that they can think twice next time. The center point is to make this thing in multiple languages so that people would be more familiar and eager.)
• Building a system following the design guidelines from the book. It doesn’t have to be obviously using alternative power sources etc. but it should highlight the choices in the design and what makes us follow those choices in a way that being shaped in the book: A product doesn’t have to be long-life cycled. We should look at nature and see how it is zero-waste. We should try to be aware of the materials we are using. We should find smart ways to use what we have and not be consumers. (I am thinking to return to book for a list of review of what those design practices are and how much we could apply them for a project like this.) The center point is to make people see that there is ways to build things in smarter ways which eventually make them more sustainable rather than trying to push ourselves to be more sustainable!
• Building a system following the idea of upcycling passport in the book (P.178). A system where we can get information about all of the ingredients in the materials themselves and use this information for the sake of recycle and our own. Kind of barcode where we see where the materials are coming from, how much they are degradable etc.
• I am also interested in using alternative power sources as well. I think it could be great if we come together and make a workshop about how solar panels work and try to put that into action in our circuits. We could benefit from this in the future. Also that would create lots of interests from the rest of the itp as we talked.

Reading through Cradle to Cradle I have learnt so many things. This book should be a mandatory text book for design and engineering foundation classes. I think there are so many things that we can get from the book as patterns of behaviours when we are dealing with our everyday lifes.