Adele Easton

Product Design Engineering

Hi, my name is Adele. I’m a student who is currently completing a Bachelor of Engineering, majoring in Product Design. I’m passionate about all things design, especially those that focus on sustainability and usability. Throughout my course, I’ve taken up as many extracurricular activities as possible to gain a diversity of skills, to grow, and make new connections. These amazing opportunities have given me the chance to:

Receive a Good Design Award (Best in Class: Architectural Design – Installation)

https://good-design.org/projects/made-mycelium-bio-fabrication-based-upcycling/

Become a finalist in the Specsavers Young Innovators Design Competition across Australia/New Zealand and showcase my eyewear designs at Melbourne Fashion Week

Become a Design Technical Officer at Swinburne’s Design and Architecture Prototyping Lab

Help Swinburne students as an Adobe Digital Coach

Design, publish and print 4 issues of Swine Magazine

Work with Engineers Without Borders in Nepal

If you’d like to know more, feel free to email me at [email protected]! But enough about me, let’s get into Moda.

My final year project, Moda, aims to address the growing issue of furniture consumption and waste by providing a sustainable alternative to traditional upholstery that helps to address the challenges of repair. Currently, an average of 24kg of furniture waste is discarded per household per year in Australia, which is a total of 216,000 tonnes considering there are 9 million households. In our yearly hard waste collection, tonnes of upholstered seating are discarded when most have cosmetic damages like tears or worn-out cushions, yet these items often maintain a functional timber frame. So why aren’t these items being repaired? The cost of repairing at a professional upholsterer or the time, tools, knowledge, and skills required, often leaves people tossing out their furniture and opting to buy new. Moda is a sustainable modular upholstered panel that can slide onto a variety of furniture frames. It makes maintaining, repairing, or changing the style of your upholstery easy and accessible without the need for any experience or fancy tools. Moda helps to bring longevity and sustainability to upholstered furniture.

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.