FIX IT!

Sustainable Materials New Products and Technologies

This theme explores new materials, products and technologies that play a key role in design and planning to reach sustainability goals as well as exemplary applications that can contribute to health.

Concept

FIX IT! investigates new materials and technologies that play a key role in design and planning to reach sustainability goals and exemplary applications that can contribute to health and comfort, including limiting waste, helping our ecosystem and increasing affordability. Further, the projects within this theme ask to what extend product prototypes are relevant for the urban planning, building, design and fashion industries to explore potentials and new systems. 

Digital tools will increasingly enable industries to produce on a mass scale and yet be versatile, flexible and able to create customised components. This theme also examines if interdisciplinary design and fabrication processes can hold a key for a new type of digital craftsmanship to trigger innovations in design. This also entails considering the building façade as the ‘second skin’ to cross-feed ideas from architecture to functions of other design disciplines. 

In the 21st century, the strong hold on minimal design started to change with the introduction of 3D-digital design and new smart materials. The climate emergency calls for improvements in sustainable building and planning, including bio-based materials for resource-conscious living spaces. In order to keep pace, the areas of intersection between different disciplines need to be continually redefined, coordinated and renegotiated. At the same time, the focus on the human being should not be left out of sight. Instead, new developments in technology and materials should be supportive of a healthy, social and sustainable living environment.