Floating chapel—A redesign of Chinese weddings towards sustainability
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School of Arts, Design and Architecture |
Master's thesis
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Date
2021
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Master's Programme in Creative Sustainability
Language
en
Pages
113
Series
Abstract
Weddings have significant impacts on the environment and society, especially in China, where a complicated set of cultural and social factors have resulted in a unique wedding consumption culture. The two distinctive features of Chinese weddings, 1) the prevalent overconsumption behaviour and 2) the focus on the temporary ritual space, intertwine to pose great challenges to sustainability, including large amounts of waste production, resource consumption, and economic cost. Thus, the thesis "Floating Chapel—A Redesign of Chinese Weddings towards Sustainability" is explorative design research that proposes an alternative design strategy to ease the burden of Chinese weddings. The main objective is to design a participatory wedding planning product-service system concept, which involves consumers in the design and production process and consequently eliminates unnecessary consumption. This thesis investigates the overconsumption in Chinese weddings, and the research process is divided into two parts: a theoretical study and design exploration. The theoretical study uncovers the reasons behind the distinctive Chinese wedding culture, focusing on the wedding planning sector, and gains knowledge from Design for Sustainability (DfS) and sustainable movements in relevant fields. This portion selected four DfS approaches (design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB), product-service system design (PSSD), participatory design, and transformable design) for the next part. The design exploration was conducted in three steps with multi-method research in the Chinese wedding industry. The first step is a workshop with consumers to investigate demands and generate the initial concept. The second step illustrates the system map and service blueprint of the existing Chinese wedding planning system to locate the problems and opportunities from the perspective of the wedding industry insiders. Lastly, the concept development builds upon previous findings with the selected DfS tools and inspiration from existing case studies. At the end of concept development, the feedback from the focus group interview serves as the final refining section. Thereafter, the thesis concludes by conceptualising a participatory wedding planning product-service system strategy, which consists of a transformable structure and a product-oriented product-service system. The study fills the research gap between Chinese weddings and Design for Sustainability (DfS) areas and questions the production and consumption system in the Chinese wedding planning industry from the perspective of designers. The outcome of the study is an alternative design strategy that enables consumers to adopt sustainable weddings by changing their role from the observer to the co-designer.Description
Supervisor
Jalas, MikkoThesis advisor
Jalas, MikkoKeywords
Chinese weddings, design for sustainability, design for sustainable behaviour, product-service system design, participatory design, transformable design