LeNSin Project

Description

Cindy Kohtala:

" LeNSin (international Learning Network on Sustainability) is an Erasmus+ funded project that focuses on capacity building for design teachers in South Africa, China, Mexico, India and Brazil. As a learning network, we have been examining how to design and teach sustainable Product-Service Systems (S.PSS) for about 10 years. Now we are also looking at the concept of Distributed Economies (DE) and how DE may connect to S.PSS, especially in these varied non-European contexts. For example, many of our partners’ cities already have collaborative and/or eco-efficient services where certain things are localized and distributed (bringing home local value according to DE principles), and certain things are shared and optimized (encouraging dematerialization of well-being according to S.PSS principles). How can we encourage these positive examples in our home regions, and how can we design and implement them with stakeholders in regions where they don’t exist but have potential to thrive?

As a teaching community, however, this noble ideal means we need to establish some conceptual, theoretical and empirical ground that does not yet exist or is extremely nascent and fragmented. Before we can understand the relationships between DE and S.PSS, we need to understand what DE can be for our project." (https://blogs.aalto.fi/makerculture/2017/10/19/localizing-and-distributing-production/)