In Holding Surplus House we have been inquiring into change for multispecies flourishing - starting in households as dynamic units, experimenting with resources, values and seasons. We have made two main tracks: Citizen Budgeting and Seasonal Clothing

Regenerative Energy Communities, Solar Internet and Holding Surplus House are designing with nature: letting the sun and wind power a community-centred web server and exploring householding with regenerative resources. For a week in August 2024 these research projects at Linnaeus University invite the audience to reflect on how we generate and distribute surplus energy in everyday life. 

This is part of the exhibition Sun in My Backyard at Vandalorum, 14-19 August 2024. 

Living labs are robust structures created with the aim to contribute to addressing societal problems by establishing long-term collaborations among various stakeholders. They often involve the use of co-creative and participatory methods and are anchored in a local context. Instead of inviting stakeholders into a stationary living lab and a predefined situation, which is often the case with living labs, with our workshop we aim to develop an alternative approach that will enrich the current living lab methodology. We will do so by exploring the idea of “Tiny pop-up living labs” (TPuLL). Tiny pop-up living labs draw on augmenting physical space with the goal of creating a temporary learning environment which serves as a participation enabler and contributes to community building around the given problem. In our workshop, we will use a tiny mobile house and the spaces chosen by the participants to envision, reflect and concretely develop different learning resources.

The culture of making has always been seen as an inseparable part of design. Still in recent years we have witnessed that “making” gets less and less attention (i.e. time and resources) in our design education. The reasons for this are manifold. Among others, it reflects developments within the evolving field of design, as described by Bremner and Rodgers (2013). In contrast to this development, we argue that the action of making remains an utterly valuable part of design education – a valuable linkage of knowing and doing (Ingold, 2013). As an alternative, we propose to advance the culture of making, its inherent focus and assumptions instead of neglecting them. This essay presents insights and reflections of a collective exploration into making by four design educators and practitioners. The collaboration happened in different settings, sometimes with other local actors, was always guided by constraints. During the research, questions of how design education can facilitate meaningful learning processes around making, while not ignoring the evolving field of design were explored. The result addresses the complexity of co-creation, dialogue and practical knowledge in the setting of a contemporary design education.

Our project “Waste stories” explores our attitudes, understanding and behaviour towards waste in the setting of the contemporary design field. It is part of a larger exploration into the value of making and practical knowledge, in which we as a group of design educators and practitioners, realised that both cannot be separated. Any form of making has to relate to its waste and define an appropriate approach to it. From our experience of working with students and in our own collaboration, we learned that making, practical knowledge and time are three main components that together work as an engine for discussions about waste. In our most recent collaboration “Waste camp”, we dived into the world of industrial waste and explored how the concept of waste changes when it is lifted into a practical craft context. Originally we had only aimed to explore the importance of practical knowledge in a design education that addresses change and sustainable futures, but realized quickly that our attitudes and behaviour towards waste play an important role. The project therefore developed to embrace the following research question: How can practical, artisanal exploration change or extend the understanding and care of waste as a resource? A question we would like to make part of and explore during the workshop we are proposing for the conference. 

We propose ‘resilience making’ in this paper as urgent, creative and adaptive action through an account of its exploration with students in the first year of an international BFA in design. We focus on the learning design being carried out for the fourth iteration of the module ‘Resilience’ - the last of eight modules completed by students in an introductory year structured around design tools and processes.Our core proposition is that context-rich, place-based making is a means to connect students within social-ecological systems as continua, rather than positioning them as separate from the abstract concepts and systems theory we typically expect them to comprehend. Arising from this learning design process, we highlight insights around sustainability epistemologies, meaningmaking in place, and our valuing of contextual and traditional knowledge.As design practitioner-teachers, we outline our working position in relation to sustainability and resilience education, and our aims of integrating design knowing, seeing and doing. We then detail how the module will unfold with students during May 2019 - a month characterised by:

• place-specific making days progressing in focus from personal, to community, to large-scale system resilience

• structured reflection by students on their first year learning and placebased making; and

• a culminating, ‘co-citizen’ lab week in which students are challenged to carry out adaptive action by linking their own system and timescales in the context of their diverse learning community.

We close by questioning how we might advance ‘resilience making’ as designled adaptive action, and strengthen our own resilience as practitioners and teachers of design in a time of crisis.