Recycle: About Sustainability in Glass Craft and Design

Abstract
Recently, increasing awareness of the impact of human behavior on the natural environment has brought international attention to the importance of sustainable development entailing a boost in the research into the subject. Within artistic fields including the fields of glass craft and design, a demand for aesthetic autonomy and innovation is still paramount. I have completed this project to contribute to sustainable development in consideration of this demand for aesthetic autonomy and innovation within glass craft and design. Hence, the central issues in the research are if and how introduction of sustainable principles in creative processes may influence expansion of aesthetic spaces of opportunity, and how glass craft and design may contribute to sustainable development.

To connect scientific and artistic research with glass craft and design practice and education, I have engaged in a practice-based research method in combination with elements of education-based research and action research. The dissertation presents a discussion of theories, methods and practices around glass craft and design and sustainability in relation to a series of activities including personal experiments, teaching, interventions in public spaces and collaborative experiments together with students, colleagues and users. I have conducted the project over a four-year period, as a combined faculty qualification and Ph.D. program, a format specific to The School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In order to ensure relevance within this format, a premise for the project has been to develop as holistic a foundation as possible for creative experimentation using the facilities and resources available at this institution.

The outcomes of the project include practical, artistic and scientific knowledge and insight. The contributions are manifest in a range of epistemic artifacts, i.e. outcomes of my own experiments with recycled glass as well as a series of creative outcomes of collaborative activities. Through the creation of these works, my collaborators and I have developed tacit as well as explicit knowledge and insight about sustainability in glass craft and design. Along with these epistemic artefacts, I have proposed a theoretical model for addressing issues of aesthetic content, a theoretical framework for understanding the unique qualities of scientific-artistic practice-based research, along with a technique for experimenting with pressed glass and a strategy for making molds for casting glass.