Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene

The year 2020 started with a massive bushfire crisis in south eastern Australia, resulting in disruption to many communities, the loss of lives and businesses, an estimated loss of a billion animals and the dirtiest air on the planet in the cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Canberra. With record-high temperatures and a punishing draught lasting several years, the Australian bush was primed to explode into flames. With lightning strikes in national parks, the spontaneous eruptions of bushfire spread from the north coast to the south and inland towards the alpine regions of New South Wales and Victoria. With the very hot year of 2019 affecting other parts of the planet in 2020, the Antarctic Peninsula reached a record 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The chapter that follows reflects the new progressive politics of climate change that emerged in 2019 with large mass demonstrations taking place in Australia and around the world and examines the critical role of universities in the mitigation of climate catastrophe. The following interventions are variably focused on the concept of ‘Living Labs’ where thinking is developed within a problem-solving ethos. The three contributions here offer ways to think about sustainability with specific reference to waste recovery, environmental awareness in urban settings and the contribution that a ‘repair’ mentality can make to a shared and re-cycled economy. With a clear-eyed recommendation that mitigation of climate change starts locally, the premise of the paper is that people can work with what is available as local solutions to specific problems. The impact of this approach can be essential to people who sense the impending catastrophe and who may have experienced the crisis directly through compromises in their health outcomes, the experience of trauma and the loss of property and livelihoods, though through no fault of their own. The links through the Western Sydney University campus, common ground to the authors to both its small bushland outpost and further to the local community it serves, suggest that the boundaries of the campus are permeable – and that Living Labs are both a means and metaphor for thinking about how the campus opens learning and knowledge creation about sustainability for its students, staff and community constituents

Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments

The research promotes a new approach to thinking about urban liveability in warming cities by identifying cooling patterns for outdoor common spaces

A Decade of Design-led Sustainability Projects at Western Sydney

In what follows, we provide some evidence for these claims of the relevance and importance of the role of the university by spotlighting three design-led sustainability projects conducted within Western Sydney University, and in partnership with other universities in the last decade. In selecting these few examples, we are in no way suggesting they are the only sustainability projects of note that have or are occurring at the university.8 Instead, we highlight those projects that were particularly design-led, and that showcase an affinity between design and the social learning process advocated by Manzini amongst other

Cultivating the Habits of Coolth

This chapter extends the discussions of habit to the process of adapting to anthropogenically induced global warming. We reveal the role of designed practices, products and infrastructures in habituating urban populations to a changing climate. Our central concern is the ‘world within the world’ design has helped to create. In the rapidly densifying city, atmospheric commons are shaped and reshaped by human design; climate change is lived and felt in hostile heat islands and polluted, particulate-laden city air. Design offers a critical perspective on the dynamics that have shaped the city and organised the civic practices of its inhabitants. This ontological capacity is a second order agency rarely considered in the contexts in which design is most powerfully deployed to shape the materiality of the city. We apply ‘defuturing’ (Fry, 1999) as a critical deconstructive mode of reading to point to the designing relations shaping city atmospheres, infrastructures and modes of habituation. Our focus is the constellation of designing relations inaugurated by cooling technologies. At the same time as answering a primal need, cooling technologies also dehabituate us to the increasingly volatile conditions of our common world. In response, we seek to resuscitate the concept of ‘coolth’ as a critical term describing the experience and sensation of feeling (temperature) cool. We claim that designing for coolth cultivates habits of practice far better attuned to a warming world, recognising that climate-aware modes of dwelling must be both cultivated and habituated by design

A parent and child talk about the weather

An original creative text of a performance synthesising findings of original research by Abby Mellick Lopes and Louise Crabtree-Hayes accompanied by new photographic work by Abby Mellick Lopes

Transdisciplinarity and the ‘living lab model’: Food waste management as a site for collaborative learning

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. This chapter introduces the concept of a ‘Transdisciplinary Living Lab (TDLL)’ based on an initiative at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to involve design students in the transdisciplinary research context of food waste management on campus. In the higher education context, on-campus Living Labs are one way an environment can be created to support transdisciplinary (TD) education. The UTS TDLL involved the collaborative participation of design academics, campus facilities management, industry and government experts with students from disciplines of Fashion and Textile Design, Product Design, and Visual Communication who, through team-based learning, contributed to generating propositions for managing food waste on-campus. In integrating a transdisciplinary approach with the living lab model, we had a number of educational goals, including enabling and encouraging students to integrate their own knowledge and experience as actors in the system into the final design proposition, and to critically reflect on broader impacts of their work on the environment and society beyond the confines of the campus. The resulting student projects moved beyond traditional technological and artefact-based design solutions to socially and culturally sensitive responses to a complex problem with input from a broad range of participating stakeholders. The project also proposes a model for transdisciplinary education onsite at the university, offering a way to bring those actors most impacted by a system into the design of that system

Re-pair: An Open Project for Cultures and Economies of Repair in Western Sydney

A baseline study about repair policy, services and infrastructure was conducted in 2017 by Francesca Sidoti, supervised by Abby and Alison as design researchers, with a focus on the Local Government Area of Parramatta, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The study set out to investigate the capacities of repair services to respond to the problems of waste and the unsustainable rates of divesting unwanted goods, and identify strategic opportunities for connecting community, education, not-for-profit and local government sectors in Western Sydney in social learning about repair