Community Makerspaces: Sustainable Design Thinking for Social, Environmental, and Community Impact
What’s Going on in These Pictures?
WHAT:
As part of an interdisciplinary unit examining concepts related to sustainable design as future-focused solutions, students engaged in an Empathy to Impact project in which they explored and acted for community well-being through lenses of energy, food, imagination and play on campus.
Here, students investigated a variety of sustainable designs before diving deep into a design project that might enhance personal and community knowledge, well-being, decision-making, and futures thinking in reimagining holistic well-being, energy solutions, and responsible consumption and production.
WHY:
Utilizing a sustainable design philosophy encourages students to make decisions at each phase of the design process that will reduce negative impacts on the environment and the health of the community without compromising foundational, social needs. Sustainable design is an integrated, holistic approach that encourages transformative learning such as complex systems thinking, while exploring compromise and tradeoffs in making more challenging decisions.
The basic objectives of sustainable design is to reduce consumption of non-renewable resources, minimize waste, and create healthy, productive communities and environments.
HOW:
By launching students into a design project that focused on the internal school and local community, students can ideate distinct needs of the community through observations, interviews, surveys and research on sustainable design.
In this project, students honed in on three specific design challenges that they noticed as community needs as well as attainable actions:
Help community members build a deeper understanding of climate change and how green energy solutions work - demystifying the science through building and showcasing models related to wind, solar, and hydro-electric solutions.
Investigate local small scale and urban farming programs that can help better understand systems related to our diets, while unpacking food’s effect on the planet and local communities in economic and social ways. Here, the square foot gardens and aquaponics models built by students, sparked complex systems thinking about the future of agriculture: Questions remain on whether small-scale farming that brings agriculture closer to urban populations will actually increase food security and improve agriculture’s environmental footprint by reducing the emissions associated with the production and transport of food.
Explore, design, and host a day of play around the role non-digital, up-cycled games can play in bringing greater happiness and health to a campus community.
