Designing Water’s Future

Fall 2008  

Transdisciplinary strategies and systems to raise awareness and help solve the global water crisis.

This transdisciplinary studio, involving environmental design, product design, and graphic design students, is in answer to the 2008-2009 international Aspen Design Challenge, an outgrowth of the Aspen Design Summit, which asks students to develop actionable design solutions that will raise awareness of the emerging global water crisis.

Design Brief

The goal of this studio was to find new ways to address the emerging global water crisis in order to communicate its urgency and inspire action amongst a variety of demographics here and in the developing world.

Research and Project Development

The research for this project consisted of a very broad study of both local and global water issues.  Students were asked to identify a specific demographic or area of interest within this broad study, and then to create a personal awareness campaign for the subject they chose.  Students also looked at programs already in place that addressed the global water crisis and furthermore identified the elements that worked and did not work regarding these efforts so that they might apply such lessons to their own work.

Contributing to the students’ research was a guest talk by Tara Lohan, editor of Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, and Senior Editor at AlterNet, heading the Environment and Water sections. Having written extensively on the topic of water, Tara provided valuable insight on the issues related to the crisis and shared examples of some existing conservation systems.