If one were to take all the seatbelts from decommissioned and demolished cars in Australia each year and place them end-to-end, they would stretch from Melbourne to Darwin and back in a straight line.
This Master of Architecture studio was designed and taught by Frank Burridge at Monash University in 2023.
Students investigated intractable waste streams in the cycles of production and consumption around Greater Melbourne, prototyping 1:1 designs for school furniture and play-objects that could divert resources from landfill and give them a new life in play.
By getting messy, students developed a practical understanding of the entanglement between life, matter, stuff and energy, and of the real challenges we face toward achieving a circular economy: hybrid objects; identification and anonymity; sorting and processing; intellectual property obscuring what materials objects are really made from; and the sheer scale of wasted resources.
The principles learned from undertaking this task were applied to designing a school building in Victoria, equipping students with skills relevant for their future work in the circular economy while also situating their projects within critical discourses on the relationship between how people learn and the spaces they learn in. Critical thinking can reduce waste by challenging assumptions on the relationship between learning and space design, opening new paths to design spaces that stay relevant and valuable as pedagogy develops.
Waste is a failure of the imagination — the perfect challenge for designers.