Common Waste
Common Libraries
Ideathon in Zagreb
During these three days, they learned about the waste problem, sustainable design and listened presentation of the good green library from the city of Karlovac in Croatia. Aside from learning, an even more important task for them was to set up transnational teams that would work on their ideas in the upcoming months. They initialized their ideas, discussed it, and created the teams on the second day of the training. This was a dynamic and intense process, so it was good that we were doing it in nature, at the Recycled Estate, a home of the project partner – Green Network of Activist Groups. Recycled Estate is an eco-social educational centre for permaculture design and sustainable living so participants were able to see how it looks when in practice someone tries to connect sustainability, commons, waste reduction, circular economy, and many more areas at once.
Like in a proper Ideathon and design thinking process, participants were boiling and framing, flying up and landing on the ground their ideas. During their internal discussion and as inputs from the facilitator and three mentors, ideas were further reframed and questioned, improved and clarified, and changed a bit or a bit more. We ended up with four teams that consisted not only of participants from different countries but also of participants who had different backgrounds. That means they are active at their workplace, in local communities, and in society by having different roles: librarians, activists for waste issues and sustainability, learners about the circular economy, and students or practitioners in design. They cover all of the most important topics of the project Common Waste - Common Libraries. Since the main goal of the project was to connect these areas with improvements in the library areas, it is interesting to list the final outcome of the Ideathon and four teams:
Co-Lib - supporting educational toolkit for librarians
Sustainable neighbors - survey on the state of the art in the libraries and educational program on sustainability for the librarians
Change the Script - using the theatre performance and reuse of paper in the pursuit of falling in love with the books
Book it - an idea that praises circularity with the reusing of paper to produce mushrooms that will end up like a possible construction material to implement in libraries
On the last day of Ideathon we came back to the library at Goethe-Institut Zagreb and that day was devoted to fine-tuning the project ideas and their presentation in front of the audience with Q&As. We have quite a diverse teams and ideas, so the next step is to polish and test them until September 2024.
Second day of Ideathon: Start of teambuiling and design thinking process at the Recyle Estate in Vukomerić | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Drazen Šimleša (ZMAG) guides through the eco-social educational centre for permaculture design and sustainable living “Recycle Estate” | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Warm up: The participants take on various tasks in nature | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Ivana Borovnjak gives a lecture on Meaningful Design | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
The participants are listening and taking notes of the lecture | © Goethe-Institut & Matej Marjanović
The Open Space: Facilitator Yanina Taneva explains the process of design thinking to the particpants | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Participant Thomas presents his first project idea in the panel and seeks team members | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Participants Nikolas and Maria present their first project idea in the panel | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Break: vegan lunch from the open kitchen | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Group discussions between the participants and the mentors | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Participants Hilal (l.) and Meliha (r.) are working on their final presentation for the last day of Ideathon | © Goethe-Institut/Matej Marjanović
Participant bio's
Find here the Booklet with Short biographys of our mentor team and all the participants.The 4 Teams and their ideas
Partners
Common Waste is being realised by the Goethe-Institut in Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Istanbul, Sarajevo, Sofia, Thessaloniki and Zagreb in cooperation with our partner Green Network of Activist Groups (ZMAG).
