April 2019

Designing with Communities

In this seminar is designed with community, each participant need brought an item to the lecture that we thought was polluting the environment before the start of the workshop to explain why we thought it was not good for the environment. In the process, most of the pollutants we carry are related to plastics, including folders, plastic packaging and plastic water cups.

After the presentation, we participated in the corresponding workshop, mainly to discuss the pollution problems inside the campus. Kim and Michael provided each of us with eight pictures that represent different pollution and also provided a map of UL.

The purpose is to let us think about where the most polluted areas of the campus are? And how the UL community reduces pollution inside the campus. Pollution also includes air pollution, so we also discussed traffic problems inside and around the campus. Our school spans the Shannon River. Because the Shannon River does not have any boats, this has led to the fact that students and teachers can only reach the school by car or public transport, due to that reason that can be increasing environmental pollution. At the same time, When the water at low tide, we can see some non-degradable garbage passing through the water. The interior of the school caused pollution.

In the process, we selected at least 3 of the eight images according to our knowledge about the pollution. We believe that these types of pollution can express serious impact on campus pollution. Most of us have chosen plastics, food and traffic pollution. There are too many disposable food packages that use plastic, food waste, and traffic jams that result in fuel consumption and vehicle emissions.

We chose plastic as the target of our solution to the problem of contaminant selection in both groups. We brainstormed and sketched separately. The main idea of our group was how to effectively recycle plastic bottles for recycling. In the current campus, only the main building has a specific plastic bottle recycling office. In the rest area, we will throw it into the garbage bin. But we have vending machines in each building. Why can't we set up a recycling port next to the vending machine? we can set up a recycling office to reward 10 cents when a bottle is put in. This will encourage students to throw plastic bottles to the designated location. At the end of the workshop was to invest in a product using the solutions we generated in our brainstorming. Everyone has a small piece of plasticine to pinch our thoughts. Finally, we got a fountain to drink water. The function of this fountain includes a video playback protection environment, hot and cold water, recycling and card readers.

In this seminar and workshop, we realized different types of environmental pollution problems and how to effectively mitigate environmental pollution.