Sinclair interior design students partnered with Habitat for Humanity to complete a project for their sustainable interior design class.
Diane Leakas, an associate design professor at Sinclair, talked about why sustainable design is important to her. Earlier in the year Leakas had students keep trash in their bedrooms or living rooms for a period of time to demonstrate to students how much trash rapidly accumulates.
“Sustainable design is important because just the way that our culture and society is moving towards using up a lot of energy and consumable goods that cannot be renewed,’’ said Leakas “ As designers we can control somewhat of the destination of having landfills pile up.”
The coordinators of this project were Leakas and Larry Stein, director of the Habitat for Humanity Restore located in Dayton. Leakas contacted Stein to organize the project where students were given permission to take items from the Restore to use along with other items in creating their design.
There were a total of fourteen students who participated in the project, and after repurposing the items the students returned them to the restore to be sold after they presented their projects to Stein.
“I’ve always wanted to partner with Habitat for humanity,” said Leakas. “Being a creative group I wanted to challenge them to repurpose things that would have been thrown in a landfill, to hopefully save something from piling up in the landfill and making it so creative that hopefully someone would be so intrigued they would either copy their idea or buy it.”
One of the students, Kim Metter created a toy kitchen that could be played with by children.
“I thought it would be a really fun thing for the Restore to sell,” said Metter. “It’s right before Christmas and people are doing their Christmas shopping, so I figured it would be an awesome gift for kids,” Metter.
Metter talked about why she enjoys the sustainable design class and how she does her part to stay green in her personal life.
“I picked the class because I’m really interested in green and sustainable design. To be able to take something that would normally end up in the trash or in the landfill and making it into something that a child can play with is an amazing thing to me,” Metter said. “I recycle; I try to remake stuff out of things that would normally end up in the trash. My family is usually the recipients of many Christmas presents that are either repurposed things or DIY stuff.”
In the sustainable interior design class Leakas encourages her students to research methods of design that do not create more waste such as, staining concrete floors instead of using carpeting. Recycling and be aware or what you are buying is another aspect of the sustainable interior design class.
“The idea is to say when I buy something I think about the packaging. Do these shoes come in boxes or do these shoes come in bags? The bag being easier to recycle, ” says Leakas. “As designers it makes them more conscientious about their decisions of what to sell to their clients, and that’s the whole thing.”
Matt Sells
Danny Oakes