Kingston University London

An interdisciplinary module from the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture inspired students to investigate the unnecessary use of plastic bags in the UK, which led to a public display of plastic bag monsters as part of Kingston’s Paint the Town Green festival.

The Building Interdisciplinary Practice module brought together seven post graduate students with a variety of skill sets to highlight the enormity of the plastic bag use problem that faces the environment today (on average every household accumulates 800 plastic bags per year).

The student group designed storyboards which showed how the plastic bag monsters crept out of everyone’s houses one night, and joined together to make one huge plastic bag monster, which was so big that it wrapped itself around the whole earth! They took their story boards to Kingston University Nursery where they worked with Nursery Manager Suzanne McDiarmid and Deputy Head of Nursery Katy Evans  to facilitate a story telling session with a group of Nursery children.

After the children had learnt about the perils of the huge plastic bag monster, they made their own mini plastic bag monsters using old plastic bags, bottle tops and toilet rolls that the students and children had collected from home.

Once the plastic bag monsters were complete, the student team put the bags into a window display for local shop ‘Food For Thought’ which is located near Kingston Market Place. Lisa Shipp from Food For Thought was encouraged by the project as the over use of plastic bags was something that the shop took seriously themselves.

Kingston University Nursery’s Katy Evans said "It was a good simple idea and a good way of introducing the idea of recycling to children. The story boards really helped tell the story of why recycling is important and it got the children thinking."

Maisie, 4, said "They (the plastic bag monsters) were scary and I liked doing them". When asked why we did it, she said "there are lots of plastic bags and this is bad because they get shrunk down in a hole. It's bad for the rest of the world".

Nursery Manager Suzanne McDiarmid commented, “Their new knowledge comes from the story they were told”.

The Team:
Rosy(Jui-Mei) Tsai  MA in Communication Design
Jia Tian MA in Illustration
Yeji Yun MA in Illustration
David Magnier MA in Screen Design
Savvas Savva MA in Communication Design
Norma Umer MA in Animation
Uzma Ruhi  MA in Animation

To find out more about Towards A Plastic Bag Free Kingston campaign visit the website.

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