Week 4

Tutorial - Discovery

We had to pair up for this tute, think together and answer ourselves some questions to try to understand better the point of view of other UC students, and get some inspiration about our project. In view of the briefeng we got : "Use cross-media to inspire a culture of sustainability at UC" we had to ask 4 important questions : 
The first one, "What do people need/want ?" We asked ourselves. We thought of a whole bunch of simple facts : a campus where she could eat balanced food everyday, have access to water fountains, she said she wanted a campus where everything could be very accessible. Have classes in good conditions : Not too hot or too warm and equipped with functional material.
Then we thought about "What technologies can help with this challenge?" We obviously thought of today's green technologies : solar technology, sustainable landfills, offshore wind power, biofuel for cars, electric cars,... Basically all the fun you can get with the ecology.
Next question was "What solutions/ideas are being tried in other areas?" And through our research we found some facts very very interesting : We read that through architectural and design mediums, buildings can be made more sustainably and the energy use would decrease significantly. For example, "The University of Texas at Dallas, US, has won multiple awards for its student services building, which is designed to stay naturally cool and light, cutting down on energy used for air conditioning and lighting."
Or also "The ‘Green Lighthouse’ building at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, generates its own energy from solar cells and panels, storing excess energy underground."
Which are two really good examples of how a sustainable architecture can save a lot of energy.
Finally, the last question was "Have you got hypotheses about how to solve these Design challenges?" I would simply say we got to one conclusion : We think the best way to solve this design challenge is by improving the sustainability of design and architecture.

So we decided to pair up for our final project and begun to wonder what path to choose. We definitely wanted to dig more into the question of sustainability in architecture and design. Since the next step of our "thinking process" was interviewing a person that related to our project, what could be more interesting than to interview directly the persons involved : An architecture student at UC.
While preparing our questions we realised it could be interesting to interview someone with an outside point of view, someone who just discovered the campus, and would be more sensitive to the details and the work methods in Canberra.

To be continued...