Industrial designer Jan Flook demonstrates the many uses of what would otherwise be considered waste as he gives Tanya from the Dandenong Valley Special School a seat in his cardboard chair.Cam Scott
SHOPPERS would not expect to walk in to a shopping centre and see the cardboard box they’d just thrown out in the stores.
But when industrial designer Jan Flook held a weeklong display and classes of how to turn junk into useful household items, that might just have been what shoppers saw.
Earlier this month, Mr Flook set up a stand inside the Westfield Fountain Gate Shopping Centre and turned trash to treasure or at least something useful.
Students from various Casey primary and secondary schools, as well as tertiary design students from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, were treated to classes where they witnessed and took part in the process of turning rubbish into useful items, such as chairs, lampshades and plant pots.
The objective was to demonstrate how many discarded materials could be reused to save landfill sites filling up with rubbish quicker than need be.
Dianne Held from Westfield said that most of the students who came and benefited from the classes used the lessons to enhance their current environmental studies work.
“He was very good. The kids got a lot out of it,” she said.
“We were very lucky to have Jan come in and it was unusual to have something like that in the shopping centre. It was very well received.”
