Textile and Fashion Design, Universidad de Monterrey
Alessandra Perlatti
Most metropolitan areas in the world suffer from the consequences of its industrialization: not only smog but also flooding, light and sound pollution. Known for its beautiful mountains and as the industrial capital of Mexico, Monterrey is also considered the most polluted city in Mexico.
As University, we highly encourage our students to propose and design solutions based on the needs of our community, and we look for professors that will give them the support to search for these solutions outside of their comfort zones, aiming for innovative and creative proposals.
We created a group of high-performance students to work on a special subject with a guest professor and a group of local professors to propose solutions to the problem of pollution at our city. The students were distributed in three groups from different disciplines: architecture, interiors and sustainable engineering and collaborated for a whole year, creating innovative solutions.
The results were as varied as the disciplines involved. For example, some students created a passive street lighting system, which uses the light wasted in the atmosphere, and take it to illuminate new spaces, creating new sources of light. Another project team created a smog-eating billboard to clean the polluting particles through an intelligent coating process in which sunlight and wind are involved.