The short list has been settled and the winners of the first Sustainable Design Awards open to all OCAD students will be announced tomorrow.
The awards are the brainchild of Mike Lovas, 31, a mature student with an engineering background who entered the industrial design program at
OCAD last year and almost immediately realized very little was being said in his classes about sustainable design.
Lovas says, in fact, that he was "shocked at how little sustainable issues were being brought up, considering industrial design is all about mass production, pumping out lots of stuff. There wasn't a whole lot of talk at that point about the implications and impact of mass production would be on society, the environment, and people."
One of the reasons, he realized after he started talking to friends and professors about his idea for a prize, was that sustainability in this context is hard to define. The college was quick to get on board with the prize, which was offered last year but only to industrial design students.
In order to take the difficulty of definition into account, the guidelines are purposely vague, written in the form of a series of questions about material and systems. "Design" itself is open to interpretation, and the five-member jury, headed by New York editor and School of Visual Arts teacher
Alan Chochinov, was open to pretty much anything.
The shortlist includes a design for a dish rack that diverts its run-off to water herbs, a plan for an "ecoburb" and another to turn the city's lane ways into green spaces.
There will be prizes for first, second and third, as well as a student choice award, with first prize being $1,000. There were 51 entries.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Lovas
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