From makers to circular communities. A tool for sustainable emancipation

The paper describes the output of a PhD research project focused on opportunities of sustainability in the maker world. The project arises from the need to achieve a sustainable emancipation at all levels of designing, from the engineering and the industrial design to the level of do-it-yourself people, thanks to the creation of new dedicated tools. DIY-people are seen as accelerators of the transition to a sustainable society, in particular they play the role of intermediary between technical actors of production supply and consumers. Moreover it was found that Life Cycle Assessment is the most relevant methodology for environmental impact calculation, by the way the software and DB used for it are complex and mostly private and expensive. Consequently the main goal has been to make sustainability tools and methods accessible to non-technical people involved in making, in order to disseminate the Life Cycle Thinking. The output of the research is a collaborative mobile App, where an Easy LCA tool has been developed to increase the green expertise of the users, and generate a local and circular community . The project has seen the collaboration between the Department of Architecture and Design of University of Florence and the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology