Waste to Wonder is a participatory design build lab organized and run with university students in Umeå Sweden. It focused on seeing waste as an opportunity, and design as a means to address our societal challenges like ecological and social degeneration. In a three week period we interviewed users, designed a public intervention focused on physical literacy and built it ourselves out of materials gathered from the local recycling centers. Everyone is creative and can be part of the solution!
Local
Sweden
Umeå Kommun
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Parti Design Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Kasimir Last name of representative: Suter Winter Gender: Male Nationality: Switzerland Function: CEO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Klappvagen 2B Town: Umea Postal code: 90421 Country: Sweden Direct Tel:+46 73 042 63 72 E-mail:kasimir@parti.design Website:https://www.parti.design
Name of the organisation(s): Innovation X Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Roger Last name of representative: Filippson Gender: Male Nationality: Sweden Function: Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Stöcke 410 Town: Umeå Postal code: 905 81 Country: Sweden Direct Tel:+46730345555 E-mail:roger.filipsson@coompanion.se Website:https://innovationx.se/
URL:https://twitter.com/parti__design Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): @parti__design #partidesign #regenerativeplacemaking #wastetowonder
URL:https://www.instagram.com/parti.design/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): @parti.design #partidesign #regenerativeplacemaking #wastetowonder
Waste to Wonder is a participatory design/build lab organized and run with university students in Umeå Sweden. We focused on seeing waste as an opportunity, and design as a means to address challenges like ecological and social degeneration.
Using the Design Sprint process, we quickly moved from interviews and observations to aligned goals and many creative ideas to achieve them. After rounds of voting and sketching, we agreed on a solution sketch to prototype.
With some quick and dirty modeling, we had a clear design proposal. An octopus of different recycled materials and play areas for kids in the local park. Next we visited a recycling center, where construction and business waste is dropped off by trucks every day for sorting and processing. Most is burnt in a waste to energy plant in Umeå.
But we were there to gather materials to use for our design. Once we had our materials, we got straight to work building. We had to build all five pieces in one week. It was a lot of hard work turning waste into wonder. Using different techniques, working with what we had gathered.
Taking moments to celebrate our work and remember “Recycling is the Spice of Life” In the end, our “Octopus” was installed at the Umecom Festival at Broparken in Umeå. And we celebrated our amazing success and wonderful times, learning and creating together.
Regenerative
Participatory
Hands On
Circular
Empowering
Sustainability is a very wide and overarching term to refer to our need for living within the means of our planetary home, such that life can go on. This is currently threatened by our degenerative practices of take-make-waste, where we turn the wonder of life into waste. Our aim with this lab was to reverse this process and take what is currently considered waste and turn it into wonder. The solution to a sustainable future is partially technical but equally it is cultural. We aimed to create a public space intervention which would make an impact on people's expectations and assumptions about the permanence and robustness of public space design. We also aimed to unpack the notion of waste for our lab participants, by creating a beautiful design from waste materials.
This is crucial work to do in shifting perspectives and providing hands-on opportunities for people to make a difference. We all talk about the big challenges and then become overwhelmed because we may not see where we fit into it all. What can we do? Since we are all creative and social beings, labs like this can unlock immense potential and help shift hearts and minds, seeing the immense potential hidden in our challenges around waste.
Public spaces are often permanent and built to last. We used our temporary structure to explore different textures, materials, shapes, and structures. Usually not found in public spaces, and exemplifying the diversity and huge potential of what can be made with all the waste that is thrown away every day in our cities.
We were inspired by the bright pink logo of the Umecom Festival and sought to bring unity to an otherwise eclectic mix of old and new wood. We also strove to create an aesthetic which was approachable from a maker perspective, inviting others to feel they could take part in making such a structure, and could see the materials used, such as used tarps, water drainage pipes, and different sized wood.
This lab was funded by the city of Umeå making it free for participants to join, including a free lunch each day. We worked outside of the city in a local village with good public transport connection in order to make it more accessible to rural communities. Our lab took place in Mötesplats Stöcke at Innovation Stöcke, a partner who is providing free office space for local entrepreneurs working with sustainable business ideas. Our lab brought life to this recently built community center and acted as a bridge between the city center and the surrounding rural communities.
Our goal was to have an equal gender environment and so we were extremely happy to even receive a majority of female participants, as design and construction are historically male dominated professions.
We also interviewed users in the public park, incorporating a wide range of user needs into the final design. And specifically with a focus on designing for the youngest of our society who are so often left to make due in a world designed for grownups.
And finally one of the guiding design principles we followed was physical literacy. Meaning that we aimed to create an installation which would encourage movement and interaction in a diverse range of ways, inviting visitors to use their whole body and develop their physical literacy.
Citizens were invited to share their stories about the park in an interview stage. Where lab participants built a rich narrative of the park's life, from the community garden participants struggling with vandalism to the dog owners valuing the cleanliness of the park, to the families who wish there were picnic benches to have lunch in the sun.
With the short time frame of the lab, we did not have the chance to bring our prototype models out to the park for a second round of participation, however we envision this lab as a tool for cities to raise awareness around waste recycling and the circular economy. And at the same time, use the public space interventions as mini experiments into how the public space could evolve, with less strict design criteria due to the temporary nature. Opening up the design process to involve citizens with minimal risk and maximum space for wonder and creativity. Enriching people's sense of belonging and democratic participation.
The lab was organized and run by Parti Design in partnership with Innovation Stöcke. The funding came from Umea Kommun. Umecom hosted the festival where the project was presented, and supported in developing the requirements and concept based on the festival's objectives of inspiring visitors about the potentials of a more sustainable and fun city.
The materials were donated by Ume Assistance, a local private recycling company working with commercial waste, who also gave a tour and explanation of their facility for lab participants. And Vakin, the local public waste management company. The construction took place outdoors with storage and space provided by Mötesplats Stöcke, a local community developed sports hall and community center in Stöcke, a village outside Umea.
Participants were mostly students from Umea University without a background in design, but a large passion to make a difference. Local residents from Stöcke also got excited about the work being done, and lent tools and help on occasion. Finally local residents and users of the park in Umea, partook in interviews to share their stories of use, giving the lab participants a holistic understanding of the life of the park, from different perspectives.
The lab was conducted in partnership with a diverse group of experts. As the organizers, Parti Design brought a strong design thinking process, focused on research, creativity, prototyping and testing. As a key partner Innovation X provided insights on local rural development and circular economy. We also had two guest experts, Helena Tobiasson shared her rich experience in physical literacy research with practical support in how design can benefit from this emerging field. Rebecka Janols, a local service designer in Umea Kommun also joined us. She share about how we can look at a full products life cycle, and how thinking of everything as a service can help us design out waste in the first place. We worked closely with the local Municipal waste company Vakin and local private waste company Ume Assistance. They provided key insights into the daily operations of the private and public waste streams in Umea. Sharing challenges as well as opportunities from their respective experiences, and explaining the opportunities for redesigning the waste management system to increase the amount of recycled material. They also provided all the materials for our built project.
With these complimenting fields of knowledge, a clear strategy emerged, showing the need for the restoration of local manufacturing as a key solution to the huge amount of wasted materials currently being burnt before their value has been fully utilized.
As a place based lab, and education initiative, we focused first on hands-on exploration, experimentation and implementation of our ideas. In contrast, many other circular economy and recycling initiatives focus on quantifying, analyzing and reporting on the state of affairs, without taking action or engaging local stakeholders including citizens, businesses, and government.
It is crucially important for the design and creative professions to lead our conversations around sustainability, as we require new visions, innovations and cultures to emerge alongside new technologies. And what we largely observe is that all the technologies we need exist, but the culture, values and visions are lacking.
Through regenerative place-making with cities and local actors, we can grow the change we need, in all the complexity and messiness of community and culture. It's a social transformation as well as a technological one, and design as a field is positioned perfectly to bridge the two into actionable futures with live hands-on prototypes, not just commitments and reports.
The Waste to Wonder Lab is a simple and effective process of engaging local stakeholders to make useful public space interventions out of local waste materials, while building awareness and community around the opportunities for local economic and societal development.
In particular the participatory design process developed out of the Design Sprint from Google, is a key methodology which can be quickly and easily spread to other places and groups. As with most place based design work, each place has a unique set of requirements and opportunities, different cultures, and stakeholders. But we all have waste, and we all enjoy creating things together. It is deeply satisfying and meaningful to create, and this applies to everyone, even those who do not believe in their creativity.
The other key insight which can be replicated is that public spaces everywhere are designed for permanence and using temporary installations, we can be more creative playful and experimental. Breathing new life and local identity into public spaces, which may lead to longer term investments inspired by such temporary interventions. Thus, this lab can be a tool for parks departments and communities to innovate and experiment with minimal cost, and minimal risk. Learning quickly what works, and what can be implemented as more permanent infrastructure.
The Waste to Wonder approach was developed out of research in participatory design, user centered design, regenerative development and hands-on design education. Based on prior experience from teaching design education courses for teenagers at the non-profit Design Disco. And from the extensive research during a combined Masters of Architecture Thesis Project by Kasimir and Karina Suter Winter.
When looking at waste, we identified that the first challenge is to change the perception from something of no value, to something full of potential. In an ecosystem there is no waste, one process’s output is the input for another. By focusing on wonder, an abstract concept, we aimed to open up a field of opportunity, where creativity and curiosity can lead innovation.
We carried out a participatory design process based on the Design Sprint developed at Google by Jake Knap. In this process we worked individually together, through interview, sense-making, brainstorming and prototyping. After this was done in the first week, we had all voted and aligned on a design vision to prototype in a model. The second week we researched materials and experimented with building techniques. After gathering all the materials we thought we needed, and identifying the best crafting techniques, we spent the last week building the structure together. This methodology allowed us to reach a clear vision, and then make adjustments based on the materials we were able to find. This is crucial when working with waste materials, as it is not always possible to find what you were looking for, and often something more exciting comes along and inspires you.
Waste, alienation, and loneliness are global challenges. As our societies are increasingly globalized, goods and materials travel further, making it harder to return the materials to recycle them back into manufacturing. As manufacturing became industrialized we lost local character, craft and culture, making places and things that we do not feel connected to, leaving us alienated from the belonging that the built environment once provided. And as digital technologies move ever deeper into our social spaces, our attention is becoming a commodity which is driving higher rates of loneliness around the world.
We addressed the global waste challenge, by showing how creativity and collaboration can begin shedding light on a new path forward. We addressed alienation by showing how everyone can take part in shaping the places they live, with their unique culture. And we addressed loneliness by creating a strong community in our lab, as well as a public intervention which brought people together in the public space, to interact, explore and socialize.
Of course, the most important global challenge of all is climate change. While we know it is a global phenomenon, we all only live in place. Our lab was able to take these large and often insurmountable problems and ground them in a shared experience of place. From visiting the recycling centers where all our waste is taken, to building an intervention for a public space where we all spend time. Waste to Wonder was able to ground these global challenges in local solutions. Giving all the participants a sense of agency over their lives, and the future of their shared place, Umea.
We have completed the Summer Lab which was very successful and contributed greatly to the Umecom Festival in Umea, focused on the sustainable future of the city. Out of this experience we provided an inspiration for the Kommun to pursue further applications for the funding of a recycling hub in Umea, focused on building and construction waste. We inspired a new strategy for the Kommun to support local initiatives such as ours, through a community crowdfunding process using Open Collective to make it trivially easy for any citizen to build a crowd and get their initiative funded without needing to start a company themselves. With the goal of setting up local green deals to propel the green transition towards net zero 2030.
We developed a curriculum for a summer course at the Umea School of Architecture in collaboration with Sara Thor and Cornelia Redeker, researchers focused on mapping building material life cycles and flows in the local building economy. With a planned course in the summer of 2024, where students will learn our methodology and work closely with local civic groups to realize built interventions in their communities, using local waste materials.
Finally we have networked with local stakeholders and are now in the middle of planning a creative hub in Umea for arts, culture and design. Our contribution to the venue will be the setup of a local Fab Lab open to the public, and focused on being an innovation space for education and research around new local manufacturing practices for the circular and regenerative economy.
Our lab was closely aligned to the European competence framework on sustainability. Our education put an emphasis on helping lab participants to gain a deeper value for nature, locating our core lab space outside Umea, in the rural village of Stocke surrounded by nature. We used critical thinking to understand how effective the recycling efforts in Umea are, and a systemic approach to understanding the challenge of waste, and how it can be addressed. The reason we carried out a hands on activity rather than just a research exercise, was to show that everyone has political agency to take action and make a difference, and that working together we can tackle even large challenges successfully. This also gave us the opportunity to be creative, proposing and discussing future possibilities through exploratory thinking.
