The Sustainable Living Festival is Australia's leading platform for local designers to showcase sustainable and technological responses to current environmental challenges. In 2022 the festival themes - Rest & Repair, Local Matters, and Waste Not - aim to accelerate our mission and collective action to sustain our planet. With this, the festival wants to reengage the public with simple things they can do to make a difference.

The brief called for a redesign of the humble shipping container - to become the festival sustainability icon. Utilising two shipping containers, - the design goal is to get people thinking and engaged - to educate visitors of all ages about what they can individually achieve on a smaller realistic scale. The design needed to be a centrepiece for the festival that was both attention-grabbing and educational.

The Collective Co was a simple response to a big problem. The building and construction industry. Material production and use is one of the core contributors to CO2 emissions and climate change. Individuals are unaware that their decisions can affect such significant, collective global change. This lack of awareness, coupled with - an absence of information about sustainable alternatives - leads to a slow rate of change.

The Collective Co. is an interactive, enigmatic, and thought-provoking installation of materiality advocating for the belief that every person has a role to play and that individual decisions, collectively, affect significant change on our climate and planet. We have selected several sustainable material alternatives for common construction materials, creating a platform for local and international sustainable & innovative materials brands to promote their products to the Australian public.

Creating a stark juxtaposition, - the non-sustainable materials will be arranged on the floor of one half, representing a pile of rubbish at a construction site to symbolise the afterlife, waste and - heavy effect on the earth. On the other half, sustainable materials will hang from the roof in a circular formation, expressing notions of treading lightly on the planet - further promoting ideas of circularity. The choice of a monochromatic palette draws people in by creating visual intrigue and juxtaposes the two contrasting notions simply and effectively.

- Group project by Sally Holm and Kylie Shandon -