Tag: Eco Design

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Cardboard Modelling Workshop

Aimée Francis

I recently took the initiative in a group discussion while discussing modelling & exploring our concepts for the solar cookers. The group was saying ”oh lets make scale models then of it to get an idea of size” and I piped up with “why not full size models ?” – a lesson learnt from first year with Alan Birch from making full size sketch models of a drum kit, guitars, stage lights, amps etc. in a team of 3 in less than a week. I tried to explain cardboard modelling to everyone and suggested to run a little workshop to … Continue reading Cardboard Modelling Workshop

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Strategies for Sustainable Design Closure

Aimée Francis

Our final poster of the series was cradle to cradle.   Now as much as I’d previously skimmed the subject and thought I liked the cradle to cradle approach, actually this didn’t seem to be the case. Yes it’s a good exercise putting the products into either the biocycle or technocycle, but what does it really achieve? The way to gain a bronze cradle to cradle certificate in fact is just knowing what all the materials are, where they’re from etc. which isn’t really that big of a deal. You then have to try and improve to move up to … Continue reading Strategies for Sustainable Design Closure

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Week 5 & 6

Aimée Francis

First of all, apologies for the delay in week 5 it’s been a crazy few weeks with lots going on at the same time. With the solar cooker project we’ve rolled on deeper into the depths of ideas for different designs. Maybe a survival cooker, a multi-purpose multiple plate cooker, or keep it simple and minimalist. All to be found in due course. With Strategies for Sustainable Design we moved onto the Eco Design principles, looking at different ways we could reduce the impact of the product with the different Eco Principles. Again, using a life cycle analysis proved to … Continue reading Week 5 & 6

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Week 4

Aimée Francis

This week has probably been the most colourful thus far. Kicked off with lectures on biomass, looking at the different types of biomass, energy conversion, efficiency of these fuel sources, as well as uses of biomass. We then swiftly moved onto the Eco-Design strategy, in sustainable design engineering. This looks at the ways in which we can pinpoint product ‘hots-pots’ for improvement, through the method of a LCA (life-cycle analysis). By plugging and plucking numbers we are then able to redesign and evaluate our new designs with these methods, to distinguish if our product has actually improved with regards to sustainability. We … Continue reading Week 4

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Week 3

Aimée Francis

The past week there has been some interesting communication/language issues. We found out that a beamer is actually a projector , cable ties are tie wraps and they just call a car seat a maxi cosi, even though it’s a brand name. We created a poster for bio-mimicry as a group and had an informal presentation for “Strategies for Sustainable Design Engineering”, taking the strategies of looking at what the functions of a bike light were, analyzing them and asking ourselves “how would nature solve this?”. One of our main ideas stemmed from fireflies illuminating in the night. We then … Continue reading Week 3