For its new undergraduate course at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London turned to Rype Office, who designed the layout and sourced the furniture.
Imperial College was looking to create a visually stimulating common room, while exploring more sustainable furniture alternatives.
Sustainability is a key theme of modern design engineering, as well as being one of Imperial College’s fundamental tenets.
To fulfil this brief, Rype Office combined a number of sustainable approaches, including:
- Desks and a number of the chairs were remanufactured in England, bringing them back to as-new condition. Because the long-life elements (such as steel structures) are the most expensive components of furniture and have the greatest environmental footprint, remanufacturing them created significant cost and environmental savings.
- Most of the sofas were sourced from the surplus stock of major manufacturers. This is brand new, but returned to the warehouse for various reasons. For example, a number of the sofas were used for photo shoots for the manufacturer’s brochure. Surplus stock is often disposed of (typically to landfill or recycled back to base materials).
- The few new pieces were chosen for their high quality and ability to be remanufactured – and commissioned from UK manufacturers to contribute to the UK economy.
- The wall-hangings were designed to efficiently serve multiple purposes. While they are pieces of art in their own right, they are also acoustic panels and were designed to bring together the furniture colour palette.
Director of Rype Office, Greg Lavery commented: “We work in a different way to other furniture companies.
The Manufacturer’s Annual Leaders Conference (TMALC)
Director of Rype Office, Greg Lavery will be speaking at this year’s TMALC at The ICC in Birmingham on Wednesay 25 and Thursday 26 November.
He will be delivering a presentation discussing new disruptive business models and how to respond.
For further information and to register for this year’s event, please visit the website.
“We start with the broad client brief and budget, and then source furniture from a range of more sustainable sources across our extensive network, iterating the design with the client as we find ideal pieces.
“The team at the Dyson School embraced this alternative approach because they could see the benefits accumulating every meeting.”
The school’s operations manager, Samuel McKenney added: “We hope that this room will encourage our students to think beyond the traditional linear ‘take-make-waste’ journey of products towards more sustainable circular approaches where every product has multiple lifetimes – just like our furniture.”
