Circular Economy: Material Flows and Sustainable Materials – Practical Applications

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

2.20

Create Your Own Design Case Study

For this week’s assignment, we’ve tried to create a task that hopefully feels like a meaningful and fun last step of part 2. As the title states, this is all about you creating your own design case study.

One important aspect of the assignment is that you can be as ambitious, and spend as much time as your work/life situation allows, either doing more of a mini case study or developing a longer, more in-depth case study. As you have seen in the previous nine steps during week 4, a design case study can deal with a wide range of topics, connect the dots between different issues and design practices, and deliver blueprints for future activities.

Your design case study should be structured in the same way as a regular page, step of this course:

Title of the design case study in bold
An introduction paragraph in bold of two to three sentences summarizing the case study
The actual case study with text, videos, images, interactive features
Further reading, learning and references
Author, copyright or no copyright, creative commons

And be creative without overthinking the assignment and trying to create the perfect case study.

1. What will your case study focus on?

Is it a consumer product you’re familiar with and use on a daily basis, or something you’re interested to know more about, but haven’t used? Or is it more of a built structure, building, or mega-machine? Or is it a land and lived spaces object, installation, outdoor space, city block, trail system or on an even larger scale? It can be an inspiring, good example, or something innovative, futuristic, or it can be something destructive, unsustainable, or linear.

2. Researching your focus area, object, structure, space

Search for and find relevant references and informative, factual material to build your case study on. Do a web search, search research collections like Google Scholar, use AI chats or tools, go through YouTube or similar video platforms. If you have the time, you can create your own interviews, videos, investigations of your focus area.

3. Organize your gathered material, structure it and write

According to the list at the top of this page, start to build your design case study. It often makes sense to finalize the introductory summary at the end, and add to the Further reading list along the way as you write and put things together. You can add your case studies here in Studium as a comment, link to a social media or blog post, or link in Whatsapp.

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