Eco-Design Challenge

Problem

How can young people concerned about the environment take practical action to improve their immediate surroundings?

Response

Year 8 students were trained as sustainability experts and got the tools to discover the size of their school’s carbon footprint and how to reduce it.

Result

16,000 students from across the North East calculated the carbon footprint of their school and five schools were shortlisted for having exceptional ideas.

What was initially thought to be a simple project became a whole school investigation which enlightened our understanding of the use, misuse and abuse of our energy supplies.

Caroline Pryer, Headteacher at Ponteland Middle School.

Similarities with Cornwall

Dott Cornwall has engaged schools across the county in their own Eco Design Challenge. Year 8 students across Cornwall are busy calculating the carbon footprint of their schools – from travel to and from school to school meals – and coming up with design solutions to reduce their findings

As Year 8 students (young people aged 12–13) travel to school each day, use the facilities and throw their waste into the bins, they may be adding to the school’s carbon footprint, but they are also picking up a detailed picture of how their school works – or doesn’t work. So ran the thinking behind the Dott Eco Design Challenge. If schools were going to be made more eco-friendly, the students would be the ones who knew how to do it.

Nick Devitt, from Dott 07, says all the students needed was help unlocking what they knew. Designers from Dott07 provided tools to help them compile a complete picture of their school environment.

The first were computer aided design tools. A spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be an obvious tool to give students tasked with redesigning their school but, as Devitt says, any design project needs good data to work with:

‘The idea was to ask schools to look at their ecological and carbon footprint over a 24-hour period and then to redesign an aspect of their school based on that.’

Where the designers could help here was by creating a way for students to visualise the data they’d collected. ‘The carbon calculator we created was a spreadsheet, so they had to populate it, make some calculations, and then put them into another product we developed, the cartoon calculator, which creates the cartoon image of the school. So, from numbers and statistics you get a visual image, which is an important transition to make. People can look at it and see, for instance, that they don’t organize their rubbish properly. it was immediately obvious which issues needed to be tackled within the school.’

Drag and drop computer graphics were the next tools provided to help students create a picture of how much energy or water was used in the classrooms or toilets, how much recycling was done, or what went on in their canteens.

Once the pupils had created an ecological picture of their classrooms or canteens they had to come up with ideas for how to make these parts of the school work better for the environment.

The Response

Brainstorming ideas for potential solutions was the next step. Local designers, architects, engineers and undergraduate design students helped out in schools across the North East, encouraging Year 8 pupils to think of ways their school could work better for the environment. They wanted the pupils to think about more than just redesigning how their buildings looked.

Rachel Deller, Designers into Schools Co-ordinator for Dott 07, worked with the students from Acklam Grange School in Middlesbrough: ‘For many people there is a confusion about what design is and what designers do,’ she says. ‘One thing we wanted to show was that drawing, using Computer Aided Design, making models, etc. are all simply tools. Design at this stage is the ideas you have and how you communicate these ideas to other people. The other things are important, but come with practice. Nick also worked on getting the team thinking with the right side of their brains in a creative way and letting their imaginations take over.’

Thirty designers went into schools in the North East to help students work out how to make their school more sustainable. They included product designer Sebastian Conran, who visited Lord Lawson of Beamish School in Gateshead, and new graduate Sarah Bray, who encouraged students at George Stevenson School in Newcastle to do charades to show their design idea because it helped them explain them better than writing or drawing.

Taking creative, innovative approaches to researching information, compiling it in easily accessible and useful ways helped the students feel they were working in an efficient way to help tackle their school’s carbon footprint.

The Outcomes

After the year 8 students had identified the eco-problems in their school, they started drawing up their ideas and re-working and prototyping them, until they’d found the best solution. They also wanted to consider and analyse their designs from a user’s point of view.

At Lord Lawson of Beamish School in Gateshead, food packaging was one of the biggest problems they identified. The Year 8s wanted to transform the food containers used by their canteen so that they could be made from recyclable materials. Currently they used plastic and polystyrene boxes, which the students said added substantially to their school’s carbon footprint.

While redesigning them, the pupils considered the need for strength, so the new boxes would be easy to hold, eat from and store. With the help of designer Sebastian Conran they also prototyped some innovative shapes and formats including a takeaway pasta dish which holds a knife and fork in the clasp, making it more practical to use.

Geography students at Lord Lawson of Beamish also realised the way they travelled to school made a big impact on their school's carbon footprint. With architect Michael Atkinson they designed a new system of bike sheds that could be fitted into the new school building the school aws planning to build.

Water wastage was a problem at St Hild’s Church of England School in Hartlepool. The students concentrated on reducing this waste by designing a curved, transparent extension to the school’s roof to collect rainwater, channelling it onto an electricity-generating water wheel and then on into storage tanks. This way everyone could see how much water and energy were being saved and this would in turn encourage them to save even more.

Acklam Grange Middle School from Middlesbrough won first place in the ECO Design Challenge Awards for the best researched and designed idea.

Their proposal included solar panels to generate energy on site, filtration ponds to clean the waste water from the canteen and vegetable patches to supply food.

Across all schools, Year 8 students and the teachers who helped them, agree that working through a design process and using design tools like brainstorming and visualisation and prototyping have taught them a lot.

They have learnt how to:

• Research an issue they care about and validate their findings
• Practice thinking about and designing fun, imaginative things and services
• Think about their effect on the environment and find solutions
• Get people talking and ask the right questions to analyse a project. Is this a good idea? Is it feasible? What else could we do?

Eco design days are now a regular event in some of the schools that took part in the ECO Design Challenge.

Since 2007

Since the Dott07 project ran at Tanfield School the school has:

Continued to develop the garden as part of the curriculum for Year 10 students to help them achieve Youth Achievement Awards. They have not built the bubble yet, but they do have a school garden.

Had visitors from a school in Newcastle, Australia. Its Head Teacher and Deputy Head Teacher wanted to speak to the students and teachers who had been involved in the Dott07 ECO Design Challenge to see if they could implement the project in Australia. They were particularly impressed with the student participation and the developments that have taken place as a result. 

Gained support from the local allotment association and Durham County Schools Meals Service. The garden won’t produce sufficient vegetables in the near future to supply the whole school but it is something they are working towards.