The ReUSE Centre

This studio involves the design of a ReUSE Centre, a place to find useless waste materials, to make useful things for education. MADA will have funding for this live experiment to stimulate reuse behaviour change at Monash University Caulfield Campus. This reuse value chain is emerging in the circular economy as an alternative to recycling and landfill. A major design challenge involves sourcing the fragmented artefacts. This project concentrates on creating a working environment to prepare and store these leftovers ready for creative action by others.

To determine a functional brief and site for the proposed venue, students assessed the challenges and opportunities within the existing SMART Space, compared this to other potential spaces across the campus, and visited relevant facilities around Melbourne. This involved visually classifying the actors, new material inputs, waste material outputs and salvageable material within the system boundary of the campus metabolism. Together, students quantified the available building materials subject for demolition nominated in the Caulfield Campus Masterplan 2017-2030 and prepared a questionnaire to engage others with the project development. For the proposal, students individually developed a masterplan strategy to determine their framework, preferred location and an upcycle concept design with the remains. To drive reuse behaviour, the studio cohort recognised this centre needs to be a place that not only supports finding objects, but also making things in a maker space, as a venue to support waste related education across the university and region.

Studio Leader: Peter Ho