On 22 and 23 September 2021, the Cité du design proposed a circular design workshop to the participants of OSCaR (Opera Sceneries Circularity and Resourceefficiency), a European project that fosters eco-design and resource efficiency in the management process of opera sceneries in Europe.
The project gathers three opera houses, Lyon, Göteburg and Tunis, with experts from different fields: the Cité du design, the CIRIDD (International Resource and Information Centre for Sustainable Development), Unesco Chair in Life Cycle Assessment and Climate Change (ESCI-UPF), and AdMaS (Centre for Research on Building Materials).
The first objective of OSCaR is to provide the technical departments of European opera houses with science based and easy-to-use environmental knowledge about the ecological footprint of their sets so that they can make better informed decisions while they are in the phase of design and construction.
In addition to improving the ecological footprint, second purpose of the project is to confront production management with design methodologies, to see how these methodologies could help the technical departments of opera houses to better integrate the principles of the circular economy in their production management.
The workshop programme began with an immersion in design by discovering of the Cité du design, the Cabane du design and the Mathériauthèque (Material resource center), and continued with a co-creation workshop.
The workshop participants, representatives of the technical and production departments of European opera houses, scenographers, and actors from public and private organisations involved in eco-design and the circular economy, worked together on various short and long term solutions.
The workshop led to the creation of tools enabling the development of collaboration and informationsharing between opera houses but also within their internal organisation. These results highlight the need to equip the sector with digital collaboration platforms in order to improve its performance on sustainability and circularity issues.
The workshop's findings will be presented during the annual conference of Opera Europa, leading service organisation for professional opera companies and opera festivals throughout Europe
