Join us virtually on April 20 to hear about 7 research presentations focusing on circular economies and local ecologies through our Design for Regional Resilience program and a concurrent research partnership with Recycling Alternative on the WHIZE (Waste, Inclusive Hiring, Innovation + Zero Emissions) project. 

All Welcome!
Wednesday, April 20 | 5:00 – 6:30 pm
Online – RSVP Here

Throughout 2021 – 2022, Emily Carr student designer teams worked directly with the technical and business leads of local SMEs to develop and implement applied solutions to design-driven gaps in areas of industrial, interaction and service design problems. The students received mentorship from Faculty Lead Sarah Hay and our Research Associate Laura Kozak, with assistance from Emily Carr’s Material Matters lab and their design researchers Chiara Schmitt and Sola Olowo-Ake.

On April 20, Design for Regional Resilience teams will give a 5-minute presentation summarizing the work they concluded, followed by a 15 minute presentation from the Recycling Alternative WHIZE project team.

Design for Regional Resilience student-company partnerships are:  Giulia Borba with Ellingsen Woods, Mason Sorbara and Christa Clay with Janaki Larsen Studios, Leea Nadeer Contractor and Zeynep Bozdayi with Jarr, Shelby Sixsmith with Reusables, Alexander Swanson with ShareWares, Soumya Mittal with Susgrainable, and Wei Wei with Terraforma Systems.

Read more about the Spring 2022 cohort here.

Recycling Alternative: WHIZE Project students are:  Christa Clay (Fall 2021), Kimia Gholami (Fall 2021/Spring 2022), Zahra Jalali (Fall 2021/Spring 2022).

About Design for Regional Resilience 

Modelled after the highly successful Design for Startups program, this new initiative brings the transformative power of design to SMEs by connecting them with designers to produce deliverables that will have impact on their business and on local and regional circular economies broadly. Approaches may include reuse/redistribution; active sharing within partner or customer networks; and rethinking product-service relationships.

About Recycling Alternative: WHIZE Partnership

Recycling Alternative: WHIZE project (Waste, Inclusive Hiring, Innovation + Zero Emissions) is a partnership between Recycling Alternative and Living Labs/Shumka Centre. Aimed at developing and delivering applied design-led solutions for integrating the business functions and material outputs based on circular economy principles, the research project initiatives included stakeholder engagement and participatory design, service design and system mapping, production of infographics and data visualization.

This programming on circular economies and local ecologies has been realized with support from The National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program.