Design For Zero Waste

The design brief for my Product Design 2 class over summer term was designing for sustainability, more specifically zero waste. The goal was to take an existing product and totally redesign it as well as a system in which the product would create zero waste. I choose something close to my heart for the project, skimboards. We studied existing products, created full Life Cycle Analyses for its material components, conducted in-depth material reseach, generated alternate concepts, refined our concepts, developed business plans and product life cycles, and finally fabricated our final prototypes. It was an intensive 14-week project, more heavily bias toward research than any other project i'd worked on previously. On the day of our final presentation, I wore conservative gray suit pants and as my presentation began, Heidrun, one of the instructors remarked that I should have worn board shorts to make the presentation more authentic. That's when I took off my pants. Little did anyone know I was wearing board shorts underneath my suit pants, and I figured starting off the presentation by dropping my pants would definitely get everyone's attention. And it worked. The presentation was strong, the response to my project was overwhelming, and my patent-
pending sustainable skimboards, called ecoDeck TM, are now on display in the Art Center student gallery.