University of Manchester: official ‘Sustainable Futures’ degree show poster

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University of Manchester’s Department of Materials held an open call competition for the official ‘Sustainable Futures’ 2020 degree show poster. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the 2020 degree show has since been cancelled. However, the below design was chosen to be the official poster.

This design was inspired by the Sustainable Futures theme, where I depicted a dystopia of the worst case climate crisis scenario. It features a burning landscape, polluted waters and floating landfill of textiles – not completely unlike the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and those of its kind. Unfortunately some of the exciting sustainable innovations in materials and textiles won’t be displayed during the degree show, however, the poster is still representative of my final year circular innovation project.

Catastrophic amounts of post-consumer waste is the reality of modern disposable fashion. Our innovative research project hoped to challenge this through developing a circular system that re-purposes waste substances into a new functional material. This research was carried out in partnership with Shannon Winters and sponsored by Better Worlds.

At the Faculty of Science and Engineering’s Better World 2020 Awards, Shannon and I were proud to be one of very few undergraduates, among professors, researchers and industry leaders, who received funding for our projects aimed at finding innovative solutions to the world’s social and sustainable challenges.



This design was later re-purposed for Sophie Filomena‘s jewellery competition. Check out the full submission here.