2014 Project 1

How many resources do you use in your everyday life

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 and the second part interrogates this consumption in relation to the students’ lifestyle.

After surveying their personal consumption of water, food and energy and looking at how much waste they produced for a week, students individually compiled their results in a simple chart. Later, small groups were assigned one of the resources and investigated how daily habits and way of life impact their consumption. 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. The format of the diagram was chosen specifically as an efficient yet graphically simple representational tool to convince an audience of a clear and straightforward message.

The pedagogic objective with this first exercise was to initiate a discussion on issues of sustainability from the immediate everyday environment of the rience rather than starting with broader problems which often seem unreachable or disconnected to the students.

This goal was achieved in two ways. First the personal survey made students realize their implication in broader processes of production and consumption of resources. Second 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.

Directly linking their daily habits with greater processes of production and long term effects of resource extraction allowed the instructors to achieve a more direct understanding of sustainability issues  from students but also an active involvement in the modification of these processes.

In the following pages are displayed some examples of the students’ work. Their initial survey was integrated in the diagrammatic representation of how lifestyle and everyday decisions impact the consumption of resources and the production of waste.

The process of making these documents was discussed 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.

This presentation allowed tutorial discussions  which deepened students’ understanding of their regarding issues of sustainability.