Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication

Abstract

This paper argues for hands-on, contextual and problem-solving collaborations, that is, for a transdisciplinary approach that establishes direct connections between social and technical disciplines. It is based on our experience as a team of researchers at the Vitruvius Fab Lab (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal). The paper presents a particular research and learning initiative–STTF2013 Summer School ‘Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication’, which served as a testbed for our transdisciplinary, critical and open approach. We address its rationale and main challenges, while also discussing recommendations for other transdisciplinary projects striving to integrate social and technical disciplines in research and innovation.

Keywords:

• Transdisciplinarity
• sustainability
• technology
• collaborative design
• digital fabrication

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of altLab Lisbon’s Hackerspace and ZDB Gallery. We are very grateful to the support team (António Lopes, Miguel Duarte, Nuno Marques, Emmanuel Novo, João Ventura Lopes, Pedro Varela, Vasco Craveiro Costa, Raquel Martins, and Pedro Videira) for their commitment during the Summer School. We also greatly appreciate the institutional support provided by ISCTE-IUL colleagues, particularly Nuno Guimarães, António Firmino da Costa, and Fernando Luís Machado. Finally, we would like to thank all participants of STTF2013 for their involvement and hard work in one tremendous week.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Susana Nascimento http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1813-1880

Alexandra Paio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4144-8499

Sancho Oliveira http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1391-3194

Vasco Rato http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5097-8248

Notes

1 As an example, the team conducted a series of workshops for high school students between May 2013 and March 2014, in the project ‘Experimenting Interdisciplinary Fabrication of Everyday Objects’ (http://efioq.wordpress.com/, in Portuguese). The project was a joint initiative of CIES-IUL, Vitruvius Fab Lab, ADETTI-IUL/Research Centre in Advanced Information Systems and Technologies, and IT-IUL/Institute of Telecommunications, in partnership with Santa Doroteia secondary school, and the support of ‘Choose Science – From School to University’ Program of Ciência Viva – National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture.

2 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt.

3 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt/wp-content/uploads/STTF2013_PrototypeBooklet_Commuters.pdf.

4 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt/wp-content/uploads/STTF2013_PrototypeBooklet_Sailors.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

STTF2013 was partially funded by the Joint Research Centre - European Commission, Luso-American Development Foundation, and Institut Français du Portugal.