Page - 133 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

these principles provides a basis of understanding for design students. In class an overview of these concepts is presented, followed by a teamwork and discussion of what students know and think are specifics of nature inspired design. Redesign is another important aspect. In analyzing the Cradle to Cradle design process, Feldbacher describes a passive redesign, which especially replaces harmful substances with healthy ones, following a phase-out-list (Feldbacher 2016). Another tool is to install a positive list of described material with no or positive impact that helps to choose materials in continuous product development. A second step is to actively redesign a product. For this procedure, materials are defined either for the biological or the technical cycle and special care is taken to ensure that the product is designed for these circles. Students practice this in their own material researches within their class projects. To return biological materials after the use in products as compost means to carefully use it in design and do without harmful substances. This is an important aspect for design for climate protection, as along with the storage of humus in soil vast quantities of carbon dioxide can be stored. According to the Cradle to Cradle design concept to design for the next cradle is an important thought-provoking impulse. Every material has to be returned to biological or technical cycles in the same quality then before use or even better. To think of every part of the design as borrowed helps to focus on material flows instead of only thinking about the actual product. This was a design task in a successful project called “Trashless” at the Fachhochschule Salzburg in 2015 (Schranzer 2017). Students were given the task to design a product in such a way that after the first product use a second use in another form was possible. Some of the project resulted in elaborated circular design concepts with additional positive aspects. The idea of the Triple Top Line, a fractal triangle, is to “enhance the well being of nature and culture while generating economic value” (McDonough & Braungart 2002b, 251). It is a tool to help design products and processes with a beneficial ecological footprint. To walk around the fractal triangle and ask different questions according to each field helps to balance economic goals with social and environmental concerns and to think about all relevant topics from equity, fairness, health or resource efficiency. It also helps to draw the focus from reducing negative impact to the question of how one can improve quality. As was discussed by De Pauw (De Pauw 2015) using C2C or biomimicry does not automatically lead to integration of social and economic sustainability. Using the TTT tool gives a broad perspective about that issues and help to include these important aspects into design. The same is true for a tool called Use Life Benefits, from the publication “Nature Inspired Design”, a newly developed design concept at the TU Delft to make products more beneficial (Tempelman et al. 2015). Use Life Benefits is a brainstorming tool with twelve questions considering different aspects of the product system like purchasing of material or transport to distributors and how at these stages clean energy can be created or biodiversity be supported. In class, this tool was used for adding benefits to student project sketches. Students need a lot of exercise to manage a more systemic view beyond the product and this tool can help to do this, as it breaks down the vision of being positive in concrete steps that can be examined individually. 133