Early Creators of Sustainable Design Tools and Experiences
Eco Innovators produced a wide range of educational tools and experiences, including the award-winning animated series The Secret Life of Things, which brought life cycle thinking and sustainable design principles into classrooms and studios around the world. Alongside the animation, Leyla created practical resources such as the Design Play Cards and Game Changer Game—interactive tools intended to advance the use of life cycle-based sustainable design in education and industry.
“There’s a lot of adversities that you face when you have new ideas…but I want to try new things.”
One of Leyla’s earliest major interviews, in July 2010 she sat down with renowned journalist Michael Short for The Age’s “The Zone”. Listen on YouTube to hear more from her about eco-design, sustainability in product design and overcoming barriers to change.
“The inspiration to create Eco Innovators actually came from a self-directed study tour I did across Europe, visiting places I’d heard were leading in eco-design like TU Delft, EcoDesign Center Wales and Politecnico Milan. Whilst visiting and working at these leading places, I met many amazing people driving change, but it really struck me was that sustainability in design had a massive PR problem. The academics and experts were doing incredible work, but it wasn’t always accessible, relatable or engaging. I wanted to change that.
Eco Innovators was my way of experimenting with different formats—whether it was a pop-up shop, interactive workshops, animations like The Secret Life of Things or gamified toolkits—all designed to make important approaches like life cycle thinking and sustainable design strategies relevant, exciting, and easy to bring into classrooms, meetings or everyday conversations.”
– Leyla Acaroglu
Eco Innovators also hosted the repair workshops, provided environmental design consultancy services and designed experiences that challenged traditional models of consumption and retail. For example, the National Gallery of Victoria commissioned Leyla to provide a public-facing interactive exhibition, the E-Waste Autopsy, that offered a critical dissection of modern consumerism and explored what lies hidden within the everyday things that fill our lives. And we won a City of Melbourne design competition to find creative reuses for old city newspaper pillars, converting one into the Eco Innovators Showcase Shop, which provided a pop-up retail space for locally made environmentally responsible products (see more info below).
In all of Eco Innovator’s projects, a common theme emerged in designing creative interventions for real-world practices that would have a significant impact.
Featured Project
Eco Innovators Showcase Shop (2009)
In response to a design competition posted by the City of Melbourne, Leyla reimagined a small silver cylinder on Swanston Street in the CBD that had previously housed a newspaper stand. The proposal was to repurpose it as a micro retail showcase of all things locally and sustainably made. It successfully stayed in operation for two full summer seasons, helping to disrupt people’s consumption patterns and influence Melbourne’s street trading policy to allow these micro-entrepreneurial activities in many of its old urban infrastructure. To this day, all the old newspaper stands up and down the main street in Melbourne have been converted into these micro-shops as a result of this project, marking a huge win for reuse among urban infrastructure. Leyla’s old shop turned into a crepe stand and has been serving up delicious crepes for over a decade now!
