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Design Against the Plastic Soup - The Effect of Small Product Designs in Sustainable Design Education

Part of: Responsible Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Els Du Bois ,
Dirk Van Gogh ,
Lore Veelaert  and
Karine Van Doorsselaer

Abstract

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Plastics are ubiquitous in our daily life due to their versatile characteristics, however, these excellent characteristics also contributed to the emergence of a gigantic garbage of floating plastics in our ocean, called the plastic soup. Within this research project we investigated the opportunities by design to cope with this wicked problem. The hypothesis is that picking small opportunities in a wicked problem can have a large impact on the related ecosystem. In addition, we also wanted to investigate how design students would deal with the problem to create larger awareness of the designers' impact and responsibility. Although there is no ideal answer to a systemic problem such as the plastic soup, intervening on systems is possible. As the characteristics of a product directly influence the way the entire value chain works, designers have a large responsibility / opportunity to influence the system. An experiment was executed with 69 design students to explore the opportunities. The resulting design concepts were discussed by experts, reasoning towards relationships, needs to elaborate the design practices, and ecodesign education in a circular economy.

Keywords

Circular economyEcodesignDesign educationPlastic soupDesign impact
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3201 - 3210
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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