On March 24th, two senior tutors, educators and designers, Clare Brass and Dejan Mitrovic came to our institute for academic exchange at the invitation of Ji Qian, Lei Tian and Long Ren who are teachers from the Department of Industrial Design.
Started at 9:00 am and finished at 2:00 pm, each of them delivered a lecture at classroom A504 of the East 9th Building. The title is "Nature Centered Design" and "Designing with Nature" respectively, which attracted the extensive participation of teachers and students, including Zou Ruimei and Rao Fang from Academic Affairs of MSE.
As the director of the Sustainability Research Center for the Royal College of Art and the founder of the Social + Environment + Enterprise + Design Foundation (SEED), Clare Brass elaborated on issues appeared since the Industrial Revolution, such as environmental pollution, waste of resources, over-exploitation of forests, etc. and made in-depth analysis of the meaning and purpose of sustainable design.
She said, assuming that the life span of earth was 46 years, human beings had been on earth for only 4 hours. The industrial revolution just took place a minute ago. However, we had consumed 80 percent of the forest resources on the earth in a minute. She used such a vivid example in order to make us feel the destructive power of human activities.
In the interactive session, she compared a 46-meter long rope to the age of the earth (4.6 billion years old). The cards in the students' hand recorded the important events on earth. According to the time of the events, students put the cards in order. This activity made the students understand the destruction human beings had made on earth with their own experiences. The interactive session enjoyed a warm atmosphere.
In the afternoon, Dejan Mitrovic introduced the bag seat he designed for African children. The bag is designed based on the indigenous bamboo fibers, ropes, linen and other recyclable green materials. It turned to a "tailor-made" chair when it is unfolded. The design emphasizes environmental protection, sustainability, personality and comfort.
In addition, he argued that designers should abandon the ego model and follow the eco model which aims at the harmony between man and nature. The sustainable design, which is nature-centered, is the only way to maintain harmony among environment, society and economy. In the end, he put forward new design forms aroused by internet, such as sustainable design, sharing economy (shared products, shared services), digital service economy, local economy and open source economy, which is a revolution for traditional product design. These emerging design forms made the audiences fresh.
This project was funded by International Cooperation Promotion Plan of MSE.
