This article discusses how a Systems Thinking (ST) approach to student learning, employing Problem-Based Learning (PBL) interventions, at several different universities in Sydney, Australia was incorporated into a broader trans-disciplinary research project, the aim of which was to examine how urine diversion in an urban, institutional setting might form the basis of phosphorus collection-phosphorus being a non-renewable resource used in agricultural fertilizers. The article explores how the ST
Aspects of the ordinary in everyday dressing remain elusive to fashion studies, meaning the life of what Judy Attfield calls ‘design in the lower case’ escapes notice. In this article, the authors assemble a practice-oriented perspective to illuminate ‘wearing’ as an outcome of sets of commonplace and routine practices related to dressing, that wear a garment in and out over time, and enhance the visibility of clothing use. The central example is a research project that tests the theory of loosening the meaning of clean by trialling alternative laundering techniques to understand the transition to sustain-ability, or less resource-intensive competencies in the spectrum of clothing use. The promise of an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that draws from ‘theories of practice’ at the intersection of cultural studies, sociology and design is also tested as appropriate for the analysis of the quotidian realm of wearing and laundering; the analysis is particularly assisted with sustainable design research about the transition toward sustainable ways of living such as the development of ‘slow fashion’.
What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed in this paper as "infrastructures of care," have declined. Drawing on the findings of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be rethought as an infrastructure that potentially undermines more social, convivial, and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world. The paper asks, what role might design now play in developing alternative infrastructures of care that start with the idea of "home" as a distributed proposition?
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