Eco-Design-Sprint for Makers: How to make makers think about the sustainability of their products

Digital fabrication provides people with a range of opportunities to produce innovative products. These range from small to large, e.g. micro-controllers, drones, Internet-of-Things-devices, motorized vehicles, orthotics, machines and even houses. The possibilities seem to be unlimited and FabLabs, Maker-Spaces, or similar community places are promoting this development. However, not many of these makers completely consider the sustainability of their products. Quite often, questions of environmental friendly material, manufacturing procedures, or end-of-lifecycle questions are not of major relevance for the maker.

To create a new mindset of eco-friendly makers, we set up a so called Eco-Design-Sprint approach and applied this within our FabLab. This approach is based on the idea of Ecodesign (Tischner & Moser, 2015), which leads to solutions that, throughout the entire product lifecycle, optimize performance of desired benefits, minimize negative environmental impacts, or even positively impact the natural environment. In a continuous report-discuss-and-develop-practice, a set of ten of the most common issues that must be addressed in EcoDesign, known as the ‘The 10 Golden Rules’ (Luttropp & Lagerstedt, 2006), have been used as guidance to keep the discussion and development focused on the sustainability of the project.

In this paper, we present the design approach we applied during a study course at our university. The aim of the project was the fabrication of the FabHouse, which is an open source house based on the idea of WikiHouse (2018) but with a strong focus on sustainability. The application of the Eco-Design-Sprint shows advantages especially (but not solely) in teaching environments of multi-disciplinary teams. It helps to change the mindset of students from the beginning throughout the process.