Life Cycle Thinking Workshop 1

Auckland - 12th June 08

The first workshop in the series was held in Auckland at the Unitec, Mt Albert Campus. After the usual 'technical' issues the Jake McLaren's presentation developed the idea of Life Cycle Thinking, what it is, and where it has evolved from over the last 30 years. From there Timothy Allan explored the idea of life cycle thinking as a design tool to provide a frame of reference for the first workshop. Cris de Groot completed this with a review of the object versus system concept that was introduced and provided a springboard for the workshop.

Participants were then broken into groups and worked on defining the 'Core Purpose' of their product or service example and then documenting the life cycle of the existing product. These worksheets produced some interesting ideas and served as a good basis for each team to delve past the more obvious definition of their product example.

The early afternoon presentations were focussed on case studies which exemplified this type of Life cycle thinking. Mekalya Beaver from the US provided an interesting food oriented example, whilst Kylie Baker contrasted this with a transportation problem solving exercise that created a conceptual solution to the problem of congestion. Karoline Jonsson finished with a full product development example to illustrate the practical sides of LCT.

The afternoon workshops developed the earlier examples and asked the participants to brainstorm new solutions and then to model the 'life cycle' of their new ideas. In effect they were creating systems and life cycles rather than object scenarios.

Comments from participants:

"I thought the day was well crafted and very motivational"

"The workshops worked well. Very organised and it was great to have the pre-printed paper layouts"

"It was good that the day was broken up into the 4 sections. I was never bored"