Sustainable Design projects

large containers of nitrous oxide

Emission reduction at Rigshospital — N2O

The pur­pose of this pro­ject was to re­duce green­house gas emis­sions from the use of N2O as a pain re­liever at the ma­ter­nity de­part­ment at Rig­shos­pitalet. At the time the hos­pital util­ized ap­prox­im­ately 4.5 tonnes of N2O an­nu­ally. As N2O has a GWP-value of 273 it is a huge con­trib­utor to the hospital’s total emis­sions. Mean­while, N2O is a highly valu­able pain re­lief dur­ing la­bour and have, based on find­ings, been deemed ir­re­place­able for both pa­tients and mid­wives. Based on Unruh’s “Un­der­stand­ing lock-in” (Un­ruh, 2000) the­ory, we iden­ti­fied or­gan­iz­a­tional, in­sti­tu­tional and tech­no­lo­gical sub-sources have over time con­struc­ted a Techno-In­sti­tu­tional Com­plex. Three concept pro­pos­als were iden­ti­fied and pro­posed: A tech­nical End-of-Pipe solu­tion “N2O De­structor”,  the concept of im­prov­ing pa­tient ex­per­i­ence in or­der to in­crease birth hor­mones which has shown to re­duce the need for pain re­lief, and lastly a concept of re-cir­cu­la­tion of the used gas. We did re­search, field vis­its, in­ter­views, work­shops and col­lab­or­ated closely with en­vir­on­mental con­sult­ants at Rig­shos­pitalet.

Co-design through WhatsApp — Waterpump in Uganda 

This pro­ject took place dur­ing the COVID19 pan­demic in 2020, which means that all parts of the pro­ject cycle were digital/online and some­what ex­per­i­mental. We col­lab­or­ated with a small dan­ish com­pany, Much More Wa­ter, who had a pro­to­type of a bike wa­ter pump to be in­stalled in rural Uganda.  Nev­er­the­less, much lit­er­at­ure about de­vel­op­ment pro­jects in par­tic­u­larly African coun­tries un­der­line the is­sue with long term main­ten­ance and suc­cess of tech­no­lo­gies in­stalled by out­side com­pan­ies. Our fo­cus was to reach out and get an as­sess­ment of such a concept, with local people in the re­gion. We cre­ated a 5‑day-chal­lenge to gather in­sights and gamify our know­ledge ex­change with loc­als. The needs as­sess­ment res­ul­ted in key in­sights for fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the product and busi­ness pro­posal from Much More Wa­ter.

Forest  protection through GIS & indigenous community empowerment

We col­lab­or­ated with IWGIA, an in­ter­na­tional NGO who ad­voc­ates and sup­ports in­di­geneous com­munit­ies world­wide. We fo­cused on sup­port­ing their part­ner prgan­isa­tion CPTA, a local Bolivian or­gan­isa­tion, which provide ca­pa­city train­ing for in­di­gen­ous com­munit­ies in the rain­forests of the TIM re­gion. Al­though the pro­ject was en­vi­sioned to be done with phys­ical pres­ence in the field, the pan­demic kept us work­ing on­line. We sup­por­ted in find­ing strategies to im­prove their in­volve­ment, en­gage­ment and over­all think­ing form a sus­tain­ab­il­ity stand-point. We pro­posed ways where they could en­sure long-term be­ne­fit for the in­di­gen­ous people, once their pro­ject would ter­min­ate.

We con­duc­ted on­line in­ter­views, work­shops and at­ten­ded their train­ings. Fur­ther­more, due to the lan­guage bar­rier, we also en­gaged 5 vo­lun­teer stu­dent trans­lat­ors from Aar­hus Uni­ver­sity, who helped us with tran­scripts from Span­ish — Eng­lish.

 

Study of the funding, design and evaluation systems of government funded development — NGOs

In this pro­ject we ex­plored the fol­low­ing ques­tion: How might NGOs nav­ig­ate the ten­sions cre­ated within the gov­ern­mental fund­ing sys­tem to design sus­tain­able in­ter­na­tional pro­jects? To grasp the de­vel­op­ment field, we en­gaged and staged ‘ne­go­ti­ation’ spaces as in­ter­act­ive di­gital in­ter­views with vari­ous NGOs e.g. CARE, Dan­Church Aid, Peri­amma, WWF and more. Through this pro­ject we out­lined the ten­sions of liv­ing up to the pre-writ­ten con­tracts and ex­pect­a­tions as fund-re­ceiv­ing or­gan­isa­tion vs. the high un­pre­dict­ab­il­ity nature of the con­text these pro­jects usu­ally take place. We pro­pose three con­cepts ideas to fur­ther ap­proach the strategies and aim­ing to re­con­fig­ure the net­works, with no­tions from Autonom­ous Design (Esco­bar, 2017) and Par­ti­cip­at­ory Design.