Third year Communication Design Students at Monash University were encouraged to participate in the Aspen Design Challenge 'Designing Water's Future' by responding to the environmental issue of buying drinking water in plastic bottles. As the students discovered it takes 3-5 litres of water to make one litre of bottled water and that only one in five bottles are recycled. The rest end up in land fill. On top of this is the contribution that plastic bottles make to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", a massive flotilla of plastic garbage between San Francisco and Hawaii.

The Message in a Bottle required students to develop a campaign to discourage the use of bottled water through the sale of bottled water. The ironical message would imply that this is the last bottle of water you will buy. Students were asked to design and brand water bottles for two types of drinking water. One was desalinated water, the other reclaimed water (recycled sewage). The reason for this was to highlight the urgency of the issue, which is that we have run out of fresh water and it has come to this!

Students were also encouraged to highlight a particular water issue in their bottle design. The other purpose of the water bottle was to promote the sale of the ultimate resource book on water. This "Aquapedia" would be the definitive book on water and could be purchased on line.

Click on a thumbnail below to see the student projects.