Abstract:

Taking into account the huge number of pieces of furniture thrown away, the idea of this project is to reuse and transform them into new useful objects. The design projects start from a briefing, a specific concept, going through the needs and design criteria adopted towards a feasible, refined, and functional proposal. Our project proposal has, as one of its main objectives that the student built it on a natural scale, necessarily functional, which will constitute a final product. It is inspired by the work of the designer Martino Gamper "100 chairs in 100 days". The project has been developed by the students of the subject "Basic Design" of the 3rd semester of the Degree in Engineering in Industrial Design and Product Development, at ETSIDI, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).

A large part of our didactic proposals has, in one way or another, a special attention to sustainability. It seems fundamental to us to create sensitivity in future designers. This is one of the reasons that prompted us to ask our students to collect interesting furniture discarded by other people, in the street, clean points or containers. The second reason, even more powerful, is to put matter in their hands so that they can analyze the geometry of existing shapes, the characteristics of the material and the resistance of the elements. Thus, the proposal starts from a concept and a physical, tangible reality that at some point determines the result.

The idea is to propose a new piece of furniture, to be chosen by the student, between two or three recycled pieces of furniture that have interested him. It is obvious that it is not a question of using the collected material to create other forms, but of using different elements of the original furniture, which can even adopt other functions in the new proposal. With this work the student faces real measurements and must analyze the selected parts very well so that the final product generates an interesting and coherent proposal. This requires a very good understanding of the original designs. The manufactured object will offer a new life to the pre-existing elements that will leave their mark.

Very important is the study of the unions, between elements and materials, proposed by the students. These must be as suitable as possible. The finish must offer a clean and safe product. This is undoubtedly another of the fundamental objectives to be achieved with this paradigm shift: to design from something that already exists and that had a previous life. But our goal is also that the built design has its own entity and personality, being much more than a sum of parts.

The results are presented through a video of no more than 2 minutes that shows the process and the final result showing that the product is suitable for use. Students acquire skills related to the material execution of their own project. The skills necessary for the realization of the video are shown, evaluating the synthesis and the proposed script as well as the communication capacity of your proposal.

Keywords:

Sustainable design, pre-existing design, Innovation, furniture desing, furniture recycling.