Selected works

The pedagogic objective with the projects was to initiate a discussion on issues of sustainability from the immediate everyday environment of the students. Thus anchors the topic in their life experience rather than starting with broader problems which often seem unreachable or disconnected to the students. This goal was achieved in two assignments.

The first assignment of the course is set as an accessible introduction to the course’s main issues. This assignment is divided in two parts, the first one consists of a short survey of students’ consumption of resources.  The second part interrogates this consumption in relation to the students’ lifestyle. Their attempt to model this consumption according to potential changes of lifestyle they could make, directly impacted their perception of sustainability as a problem to be solved by others.  After drawing simple hypothetical models, the students were asked to produce diagrams where the impact of lifestyle on daily resource consumption and waste production was clearly shown.

In second assignment, students worked in groups to conduct analysis and research within their own neighborhood, to identify context specific issues that had been discussed in the course: energy, material and waste, transportation, public space and community, water, population, health and environment. Then, students were expected to create proposals based on their analysis, in order to address one specific issue related to sustainability and the built environment. The output of this assignment illustrated in the issue that the group has chosen to address; argumentation about the issue, and how it relates to the local area and context; the methods and means of the final proposal in the built environment (physical intervention, infrastructural development, change in community habits, change in legislation, etc.) The format of their final presentation board had to support the area of investigation and content of the proposal. The assignment was meant to foster opportunities for student’s academic exploration, reflection and application of what they have learned throughout the course lectures, tutorials, assignments, and readings.

For all the assignments, the process of making the documents was discuss cussed in tutorials. The clarity of the message was mainly achieved through collages and simple graphs. These diagrams became supporting documents to a short final presentation on the specifically allocated resource which students had investigated. The final presentation allowed tutorial discussions which deepened students’ understanding of their regarding issues of sustainability.

Here we shared several selected student works from the submissions of each year.