Abstract:

In a context of ecological and social degradation, product design should change and adapt. Sustainability from an optional should become a necessary requirement. Traditionally the application in design has led to the birth of the green and ecodesign concept, and the consequent Ecodesign Directives by the European Commission from 2005. However, sustainability not only considers the environmental level but also the economic and social one. This is a challenge in higher education in order to educate students for approaching the recent context, and the importance will grow exponentially in the future.

For this reason, the topic of the product design studio of this first semester of the academic year 2022/2023 master's degree at Università IUAV di Venezia, is 'global recovery', to design ‘sustainable and technological products to increase sustainability in two different sectors: healthcare and food service’. Twelve groups of students (three/four each) were divided equally to work on the two topics. In regards to the food service sector, the focus is on environmental sustainability, dealing with the quantity and quality of resources used in the kitchen, trying to reduce them in the use phase of equipment. For the healthcare sector, the focus is on social and economic sustainability to reduce elderly patients' access to hospitals by improving disease management at home, resulting in improved quality of life and reduced health system costs. A cross-cutting and binding topic is sustainability related to the product's life cycle, from production to disposal. The methods used in the studio are based on human-centered design, design for sustainability, design by disassembly, design for active and healthy aging, and design for all, in a process of learning by doing. After some theoretical frontal lessons by the professors about the methodology, the students, week after week, worked on their innovative solutions, doing weekly reviews with the professors who are more tutors, asking questions to let them reflect on some aspects, having the role of who tries to facilitate the learning process as following the Constructivist Theory. Students were pushed to use the design tools to reach innovative solutions such as interviews, field visits with an observation phase, emphatic exercises, storyboards to understand the sequence of use and predict possible errors, disassembly of existing products to understand internal components and improve their maintenance and recycling/disposal.

The design studio’s outcome resulted in twelve technological products focused on environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Through their development, students raised their awareness of a plurality of issues ranging from environmental sustainability to design for food service and active and healthy aging, while learning how to make use of design tools, and design complex products.

Keywords:

Sustainability, food service, healthcare, ecodesign, design education.