Target Hackathon Makes the Connection!

Following a two-week period of desk and field research, the Target Design an APP for left-behind children hackathon was held in Shanghai last weekend. Six student teams brainstormed for 24-hours straight to design an innovative APP that transforms the way migrant worker parents communicate with their children left behind in rural China. The outputs at the end of the 24-hour deadline were some h…

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Dreams of a Sustainable Career, Design, and Waste | #AskTheCollective 013

In this episode of #AsktheCollective, I answer questions from university students about following their sustainable dreams, design, and waste. As always, we hope you find these questions and answers useful, gain some new insights, and possibly help catalyze you to take your next step! #Timestamps 00:34 -  I want to get into sustainable design, but my professors say that is impractical a…

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Training Day: Kohler Hackathon Targets 25% of Chinese Without Toilets

  Uneven Access to Toilets Living in one of China’s major cities, it’s easy to take certain goods and services for granted. Every street has at least one convenience store, a bank, a major café chain, and a public restroom. So long as you stay in the city, you can access all your basic necessities - money, food, clean water, and flushable toilets. It’s difficult to imagine, then, that th…

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Sustainable Design for the Future

The world that surrounds us – the signs that direct us, the smartphone pages we flick through, the way we use buildings, how we move around cities – is consciously or unconsciously designed. This design has a great impact on the use and sustainable credentials of our products and systems. In fact, 80% of the environmental impacts of the products we use daily are determined in the very early stag…

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Interface: Sustainability Starts with Design

The importance of design to sustainable products cannot be understated. It is the front end of development and the point at which environmental harm can be best mitigated. The achievement of good design involves challenging designers to think "outside the box," communicate the vision and to provide them with an in-depth understanding of the product's lifecycle, from production to end of life recov…

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The Importance of Design, and the Designer, to Sustainability

While the focus of sustainability is closely linked to "energy usage" and waste, the conversation on the role of design & designers has yet to take center stage. The recent article Design is an Avocado: The Layers of Green Design by Brian Dougherty (an excerpt from his recent book Green Graphic Design) though does a great job of introducing the role that designers can play: 1. Designer A…

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The Future of Connected and Sustainable Cities

With dozens of cities in China urbanizing all at the same time, and at a pace matched at no time by anyone else, making sure cities are planned and built properly is a must. While the term "urban" can mean different things to different people, municipalities of all sizes are and always have been dynamic centers of activity. Cities offer jobs and prosperity, important social interaction, and…

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