#gravity battery

We have a new book, a catalogue of sorts, covering certain aspects of our work as the Reconstrained Design Group* over the past couple of years. It’s a handsome object full of nice words and images - some of which you may have seen first on this blog. There is also new material: for example, it features essays on Reconstrained Design by Lucy Suchman and Clive Dilnot. Please send us a message if you’re interested in receiving a copy.

Here is a short piece from the book, ‘DIY Reconstrained’, written by ourselves and Enrique Encinas:

The three words that form the DIY acronym send a clear and empowering message: anyone can do it. You can do it. But do what? What needs to be done? For some, DIY resides in a shed at the back of the garden—the Reader’s Digest manual from the 1970s that tells you how to fix everything from a drainpipe to a typewriter. For others DIY suggests punk rock, a form of expression that requires only minimum skill to achieve satisfying results, and that builds around it an active community, rejecting the passivity of corporate consumerism.

DIY is rational resistance to an irrational consumer culture. Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers declared in 1927: ‘We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture.’ Public relations, advertising agencies, and designers answered Mazur’s call with methods appealing not to the rationality of citizens but to the irrational and subconscious drives of consumers. The marketplace boomed as selling bypassed the intellect to interact directly with the emotions. This near complete alteration of perspective puts DIY in a fragile position—impoverished by its more complex appeal, its objects struggle to compete with the hi-gloss culture of brands and fashion. For many consumers, the latest iteration of consumer electronic products exhibit a near sacred aura.

In Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes describes this elevation of object status through the example of the Citroën DS, the ‘Goddess’—‘a superlative object’. He comments on the seamless perfection of the vehicle, likening it to the ‘unbroken metal’ of science-fiction spaceships and even to the smooth and seamless robes worn by Christ. Seams, he argues, reveal the hand of the (human) maker—methods of assembly and therefore dis-assembly (or fixing). In a sinister shift, this godlike approach to artefacts has become the celebrated norm of product design—think of Apple—where ‘perfection’ means not letting any grubby hands inside the pristine carapace of the technological device, not meddling with divine creation. How can DIY compete with such perfection?

The deskilling of a generation of young people presents another problem for DIY, as schools focus too exclusively on new ways of making such as 3D printing and laser cutting. This has severely limited the scope of what can be made and by whom.

It was in the early 20th century that DIY, the ungenteel inheritor of the Arts and Crafts movement, got its name. Then and now, in the Maker Movement, DIY is viewed as a creative and/or recreational and/or money-saving activity. It is helpful, useful, and fun. It is as straightforward a practice as the end it wants to accomplish. Through a set of accessible premises, ‘shed’-style DIY launches the rational individual into a journey of self discovery and learning—a journey that normally ends when function is met and hence need is no more. As a good citizen, one finds in DIY the sensible alternative to a trip to the store. As a consumer embedded in a culture of desire, however, the workshop presents a real challenge—who has the time, access, or requisite knowledge? As with the Arts and Crafts movement, the Maker Movement risks simply being a mouthpiece for the middle classes, an outlet for those with the disposable time and income to temporarily reject the mainstream attitude towards objects and our interactions with them. So what can be done?

Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, by the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.

- J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

Consumers have been programmed for sleek, seamless products far too long to accept the standard (non-designed) DIY aesthetic overnight. The desire for award-winning coffee pots (and phones, juicers, hair dryers, etc.) is strong, and for the time being Ballard is most likely right—there is no possibility of escape. This leaves two options: one easy, one very difficult.

The hard route: Adapt consumer desires to a maker aesthetic. Reprogramme people to be less obsessed with brands, or to see value in what is rough, cheap, or practical.

The various gravity batteries described in the Newton Machine project exemplify the approach with their focus on easy making over high-level production, found components over highly-refined, open-source over heavily patented and local materials over globally sourced. This is the first challenge we set in our manifesto—to reverse Mazur’s statement and return to a needs-based culture. But this is a slow-burning, long-term strategy.

The easier route: Adapt the DIY aesthetic to what people want. Introduce a better sense of design that allows maker products to compete with mainstream exemplars of good design such as Apple and Dyson. What would a DIY artefact like if it had the touch of Charles and Ray Eames? Or Dieter Rams? Or Enzo Mari? There aren’t many designed maker objects to be found. The OpenStructures WaterBoiler is one example of how such things could look. Originally designed by Jesse Howard and Thomas Lommée, it was adapted by Unfold, who replaced the PET bottles with a cut-through bottle (see Tord Boontje’s Transglass project for the potential of cut recycled glass) and used a combination of 3D-printed ceramic, off-the-shelf plumbing material and simple folded steel. If more objects like these were produced by the Maker Movement, there might be a chance of shifting consumer habits.

To complement our sometimes utilitarian approach, we are developing more designerly examples of Reconstrained Design addressing the complex notions of desire that drive conspicuous consumption. The Gravity Lamp and Gravity Turntable, for example, aim to provide a more direct challenge to contemporary design, by removing constraints imposed by its relationship to the market. The aim is not only to address stylistic issues but also the problem of making—that the route to ownership should not be constrained by a lack of skills or access to tools. The solution is to build a network of experts, professionals, and craftspeople, essentially decentralising DIY by engaging with the local community, its expertise and its resources. A DIY manual for a product could, for example, be a wiki that shows the constructive steps but also points the way to local cabinet makers or metal shops that will help to build sophisticated elements of a project. This approach would also support the survival of craft knowledge in local communities.

* The Reconstrained Design Group is James Auger, Julian Hanna, Laura Watts, Enrique Encinas, Mohammed Ali, and Parakram Pyakurel

Images: 

In a recent post (‘scrap futures’) we mentioned a project we’re doing with Laura Watts from ITU Copenhagen and partners in Scotland that involves building a gravity battery on the small island of Eday in Orkney.

We’ve just returned from that island-to-island journey. It was quite a trip, a proper eye opener. We arrived on Sunday evening with nothing - no tools or materials of any kind - and by Thursday we were running a public demo of a gravity-powered Casio keyboard playing Ode to Joy. Here is a brief (and highly subjective) travelogue and technical account of the process, which was not unlike a 72-hour Scrapheap Challenge, but involving the whole community.

The northward trek

Three of us left Madeira early on the Friday, bidding farewell to sunshine and flower blossoms. The fourth in our party, Mohammed, coming from rural Sweden, met us that night in Inverness. By Saturday morning we had reached Kirkwall, on the Orkney Mainland. Laura arrived on the next flight, and over a lunch of fish and chips we shared our thoughts about the gravity battery, including what sort of scrap we might use to make it - an old motorcycle, a car or tractor, even a crashed Vespa someone had mentioned. There was also the question of what we should do with the energy it released. Previously we had powered a record player; this time we had in mind a lamp, or an old radio playing The Shipping Forecast. None of us had ever been to Eday, an island of ten square miles with a population of just 130 people.

The wind picked up and the afternoon ferry was cancelled, so we headed over to Stromness on the other side of the Mainland to spend the night in the atmospheric Stromness Hotel. Enrique waxed poetic on the irony of Silicon Valley’s dreams of colonising Mars, when we were stranded ten miles from our destination by a bit of wind. But we made the best of it, and after a full Scottish breakfast with haggis on Sunday morning we drove back to Kirkwall and caught the afternoon ferry. We arrived after dark, windswept and seasalted, and followed the island’s only road to the only year-round accommodation, the hostel, where we met our documentary filmmaker, Aaron Watson. The trip north had taken three days, leaving only three days to build for the demonstration.

Build Day 1

We woke Monday morning to the sound of a large wind turbine spinning fast outside the hostel, telling us the weather conditions. In fact the island grid is powered entirely by renewable energy - Eday’s experimental and community-driven use of renewables, including wind, tidal, and solar, as well as storage in hydrogen fuel cells, is the main reason we were keen to visit. Even the electric heaters in the hostel are powered at certain times by energy overflow from the wind turbine outside. Everyone we met on Eday was extremely well versed in energy generation and storage, including the seven children of the local primary school who spoke knowledgeably about electrolysers and curtailment.

We met Clive, our local fixer and project partner with Eday Renewable Energy Ltd., after a solid breakfast of porridge and bacon butties. Before we set out to gather scrap materials and tools, he gave us a pep talk of sorts: ‘This may look like chaos. But I assure you the machine will be built, it will be demonstrated, and you will leave happy on the ferry Friday morning.’ In the car he pointed out the island’s landmarks and mentioned some of the people we would likely meet that day. As far as we could tell you were not allowed to have the same name as anyone else on the island - when a second Kate arrived she was renamed Katie, and the second Mike became Mick. This we decided was as good a definition of a small island as any we’d heard. Clive warned us that the community would need some convincing before they got involved. We should expect questions like: What’s in it for Eday?

The first stop of the morning was the Old Church, which had been bought by a woman from London with big plans in the 1980s and has sat derelict ever since. Here we found an old motorcycle, a red Kawasaki, parked in the middle of the church amongst other scrap (a Super 8 camera, a record player, a typewriter). The bike had only 12,000 miles on the odometer, but it was buried under a thick blanket of corrosive pigeon shit, and all of its insides were seized beyond reasonable use. We took a lot of photographs. At the second stop, the New Church a minute down the road, we found a large brass bell salvaged from a sunken steamship. We thought we might use it as a weight for the gravity battery. Permission would have to be sought, Clive said. The third stop was an old mechanic’s back garden, full of rusted cars and a jumble of engine parts. ‘Did he die?’ someone asked. ‘No, just left the island’, Clive replied. James opened the hood of an old BMW and found a live rabbit inside.

We checked out the building site next, a shed by the pier used mostly for deliveries. It had a forklift and plenty of room - the first real success of the day. We would have to clear out twice a day when the ferry docked, but aside from that it was ours. We agreed it would do very nicely. Our other Eday contact, Andy, who works with Clive, met us at the shed. From there we drove to an old quarry on the far side of the island, a five-minute journey. As we walked around the site, staring up at the sheer sides from the quarry base, someone had an epiphany about making a gravity-powered keyboard. Andy, it turned out, not only knew how to play (he was currently the church organist), he had also been the keyboardist in an eighties band called Freeez, who had a number one single in the US dance charts (‘IOU’). We all agreed that if we could get hold of a scrap keyboard the issue of what to do with the energy released by the gravity battery was solved.

After lunch at the hostel we met some people from the community in a building next to the island shop. The key moment in this meeting was the suggestion that Mick, who was spotted leaving the shop outside, had an old motorcycle in his barn; someone ran out to talk to Mick and he kindly agreed to let us follow him home. He was a large man in a CCCP shirt, who told us in a Liverpool accent to mind the ducks and sheep. He opened the barn and dragged out an old dirt bike, its wheels clogged with hay; he used an axe to free up the front wheel, and four of us rolled it up the driveway in the rain and waited as someone found a van to bring it back to the pier shed. We were cold and wet, and the light was fading on our first day, but we had a motorcycle and a rough plan. We ate a hearty dinner at Roadside, the island’s former pub turned occasional restaurant (actually just a dining room in a private house), and then returned to the hostel to drink whisky and sleep.

Build Day 2

We arrived at the shed Tuesday morning at 9.05am to find several islanders already waiting in boilersuits, ready to work. We introduced ourselves, made some tea, and set up to start cutting into the bike, while Clive got on the phone to order a new chain from the Mainland - the only part the bike was missing. We quickly sourced some necessary tools from generous community members, including an angle grinder (Aaron the filmmaker’s favourite, because it made a photogenic shower of sparks), a lathe, and a socket set, and got to work. By lunch the bike was stripped, leaving only the parts necessary for the gravity battery - the frame, engine, and rear axle. In the afternoon two of us went to the school to give a workshop while the others stayed back at the shed. The wind blew and the rain poured down. Countless cups of tea were consumed. Soon the day was over, the children went home, the shed was locked up, and at the hostel Mohammed made his special dhal. It was Halloween night on a remote Scottish island, so obviously we watched The Wicker Man. More whisky was consumed.

Build Day 3

The challenge now was how to get the gravity battery over the fence and down into the quarry, our chosen site for Thursday’s demo. We noticed a large tractor - who did it belong to? Could somebody drive it there? Health and safety was still a headache that Andy was dealing with, negotiating with the property owners in England and the insurance company. It was blowing a gale all the previous night and all morning; the rain beat down on the corrugated iron roof of the shed, making it hard to hear anyone speak.

On the positive side, people from the community were beginning to get excited about working together on this strange and unexpected project. Old habits were shifting as people from different parts of the island who rarely spoke to each other met and pitched in as a team. Hamish and Mel, native Orcadians, came to join in and brought their son Robbie, an apprentice engineer. An old Casio keyboard was found, and after some minor tinkering was brought back to life. The chain arrived by afternoon ferry. Calculations were underway for rigging a pulley over the quarry edge. More people showed up, to work or to watch. Clive told us stories of moving to London in the late sixties, working in Carnaby Street, seeing the Stones in Hyde Park. ‘What brought you up to Eday?’ we asked. ‘Cheap innit’, he said with a smile. We met other southerners who said the same thing. But their attachment to the place had obviously gone very deep.

On Wednesday afternoon we went to use the lathe in the shed of a friendly guy named Mike, another Englishman and ex-submariner who lived in the old schoolhouse. Mike left a note in the shed telling us what to do if a blackbird showed up at the door - he had trained the bird to come in and ask for food when it was hungry. Sure enough the bird showed up, looking at us expectantly until we passed it some raisins and a biscuit. When we finished our machining Mike invited us into the main house. In what turned out to be one of the highlights of our week in Eday, Mike showed us not only a display he’d made on the history of the school, but also - leading us through a hole in the wall - no less than a full-sized model of the inside of a submarine, complete with salvaged periscope, control panels, and torpedo launchers. We walked through room after room, through sleeping quarters with life-sized mannequin sailors, until we reached the end and emerged back into the schoolhouse. We shook hands with Mike, somewhat unsettled by what we’d just seen, and returned to the pier shed.

That night at dinner we discussed our visit to Eday as a three-act play. The first two acts, we decided, had established the principal characters and their relationship to the world they lived in. The inciting incident of Act One was our arrival on the island, with a mad plan to build a gravity battery from scrap. The rising action of Act Two was the first three days of building, where we pitched in with the community to make the thing we’d set out to make - the spectre of public humiliation creating tension and driving us forward. The character arcs of ourselves and everyone in the community developed under this pressure; Andy and Clive even told us that relationships between community members had been altered - for the good - by our presence. People who hadn’t spoken to each other in years exchanged words; old feuds were put to rest or laid aside. For our part we gained insights about ourselves, our roles, and the nature of our work.

Every story needs a climax, and it usually involves collectively overcoming a crisis. So it was not unexpected that we should receive a phone call at dinner that night, the night before the public demo, telling us that the absentee landowner would not allow access to our chosen site, the quarry, without insurance - and negotiations with the insurance company had reached an impasse. Andy was trying his best to provide evidence of due diligence to both parties; but insurance is about predictability, and is naturally risk-averse. Testing a gravity battery made from scrap in an abandoned quarry with children present is not an ideal scenario from the insurer’s perspective. How could we bridge the gap between health and safety, on one hand, and daring innovation and experimentation, on the other? How could we achieve a satisfying resolution and leave happy, as Clive promised, on Friday morning?

Demo Day

Andy, as we mentioned above, was a professional musician in his previous life - he had played on Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. So when he sat down to rehearse for the demo on Thursday morning, perched on a wooden crate in shorts and hiking boots and a down jacket, tapping at the keys of a salvaged Casio, the other islanders laughed and jibed goodnaturedly: ‘You’ve come a long way, Andy!’ The crisis at the quarry had been overcome, or rather bypassed completely, by ten o’clock: just as the insurance problem was solved, we decided it would be easier to stage the demo at the pier near the shed, so that no major moving of equipment would be involved. Now momentum was gathering towards the final event and resolution.

The demo was scheduled for after lunch. Word spread and by late morning a small crowd started to gather. We were busy with small jobs: like untangling rope for the pulley to suspend the mass, a 25-litre water container, from a long metal pole extending off the fork of a tractor Hamish had driven over from his farm. The motorcycle chassis that formed the heart of the machine was strapped to a wooden pallet. We only had to figure out how to lift the weight into the air - in Madeira we had used a solar panel, but that was not an option in Orkney. Various attempts were made, including hooking up the battery from Mike’s car, but with no success.

The school bus pulled into the parking lot in front of the pier shed and the children got out. They lined up in front of the crowd and showed drawings of the gravity batteries they had designed earlier in the week. One child broke down under the pressure and sobbed loudly, but eventually held up his drawing between shaking hands. The weather was calm and dry. We handed out Madeiran sweets to the kids, who wore reflective vests for safety. Everyone stood facing us in a semicircle and waited for the show to begin. At the last moment a solution was found: James improvised an attachment to a rechargeable electric drill and used it to drive a super low-gear winch, slowly raising the water container. It seemed a bit of a cheat - though in fact it wasn’t, since the island’s grid is powered by renewables - but the mass was now suspended, the energy was stored until needed, and that was the main point. We called for everyone’s attention; released the mass; wires were connected and the keyboard came to life. Andy played ‘Ode to Joy’, followed by ‘The Flintstones’ for the children. The performance lasted several minutes, then the keyboard fell silent at the instant the water container touched the ground. The crowd went wild. We did it again, and then again - the last time letting the kids take turns banging out some noise. It was a success. We cleaned up as dusk fell.

That evening there was a gathering at the community centre. Andy led a discussion with ourselves and some of the islanders, including Hamish and Mel and their children, ‘Submarine’ Mike, Ivan and his son Jordan, and many others, that felt productive. It verged at times on emotional, as people discussed past achievements like the installation of the massive community-owned wind turbine, along with possible futures of the community and the island itself. We tried to impress the point that, given enough time and ideal conditions, their energy storage solution (or ‘Newton Machine’) would not be a gravity battery - which was something we had created out of the particular materials and terrain of Madeira - but rather a bespoke solution for Eday, built not from Madeiran sucata but from Orcadian bruck, taking advantage of local conditions, like a flow battery made with seawater. But we had three days to produce something spectacular with the community, so we decided to make an Eday version of a gravity battery - and according to those terms, we succeeded. As we sat around talking into the night, surrounded by absolute darkness except for the lights of neighbouring islands and the hostel in the distance, we also agreed that the machine we built was, in some real sense, a social machine.

We hoped that our strange event on Eday, our intervention of sorts, had made an impact on the community. We received a positive sign from Andy the day after we returned, in the form of a message that read: ‘I'm about to order my very first angle grinder, just so I can make my own sparks, just for the sheer fun of it.’ He said he’d been inspired to ‘have a go’. Between Andy’s words (and music), Clive’s stories, Mike’s submarine, Mick’s motorcycle, Ivan’s joyful exclamations of ‘happy days!’, the schoolchildren’s imaginative designs, and Hamish’s son Robbie melting aluminium in a kitchen pot with a blowtorch to cast parts for the gravity battery, we concluded that some good had come of the trip. Still ahead, Laura will write up our experiences on Eday from an ethnographer’s perspective, and Aaron will make a short film to present at our exhibition in Barcelona early next year. The gravity battery itself, meanwhile, remains on the island - being too heavy to transport - and will hopefully power Andy’s reconfigured Casio keyboard through the winter months.

Images:

We’ve noticed a lot of detritus, scrap, and abandoned infrastructure on our island of Madeira (as in most places) - from rusty Christmas light scaffolding, to useless TV antennas that dot the skyline over Funchal, to automated turnstiles that don’t scan your ticket, to those free bag dispensers for dog walkers (a noble initiative, probably refilled once at most and still stuck to every pole) - remnants of old ideas, broken futures, and faded technological dreams.

Then there is e-waste (or WEEE). This again is a universal problem, but like all problems of material waste it becomes more obvious and more acute in a small island context. Where do you put all those old monitors, keyboards, phones, game consoles, smart fridges, and Juicero juicers? Our collaborator and resident scrap wizard Enrique has forged a relationship with the organisation that handles e-waste in Madeira. He brings old printers and other objects back to the institute for deconstructing; their guts can be seen spilling out of the workshop most days. Enrique tells us that two or three shipments of e-waste are sent to the mainland every week - that’s a lot of waste for an island that doesn’t particularly care about keeping up with the Joneses.

Motorcycles are a particular obsession of Crap Futures, which is one reason why some of our gravity battery prototypes (like the one pictured above) use gear boxes and other bike parts from the local breaker’s yard. But the other thing about motorcycles, and scrap motorcycle parts, is that they can be found all over the world - they are almost universal as readily available local materials. This fact makes them especially attractive to us for our energy experiments, because we try to make use of local materials, terrain and knowledge as much as possible.

In case we haven’t mentioned it on the blog yet, we won an award. James went to Barcelona in June and came back with the CCCB Cultural Innovation International Prize for a project, The Newton Machine, that we’re doing in collaboration with Laura Watts at ITU Copenhagen and our partners in Orkney. The prize came with some money, which was nice, but also some strings: next January we will be installing an exhibition of the Newton Machine (or machines) at the CCCB, including prototypes, a documentary film, some photographs, ethnographic notes, a manifesto, catalogue, and other material we collect in the meantime. The installation will join the larger exhibition After the End of the World which opens next month and continues through April 2018.

The CCCB prize also means some upcoming opportunities for doing and making. First we’ll be hosting Laura and the Orkney partners in Madeira at the beginning of October, then we’ll pay a visit to the small island of Eday in Orkney one month later to build some prototypes and meet the local community there. With its cutting-edge energy schemes, Scotland, Orkney, and especially little Eday seemed like the ideal place to test our plans in the wild (to use that hated phrase). From what we’ve heard Orkney will be fairly wild in November.

Where Madeira has sucata or lixo (scrap or waste), Orkney has something very particular to remote islands: bruck. Bruck, so we’re told, is the kind of rubbish that washes up on the beaches, or the kind of rubbish you talk in the pub - but it’s also the kind you might find in your shed, or swap with your neighbour. People in Orkney try to make sensible use of their bruck, material resources being relatively scarce. (We’ve already heard the story of a local man who made a hovercraft out of a washing machine - ‘and it worked, too’.) We’re hoping to use some of Eday’s bruck, along with its unique terrain and local knowledge, for our Newton Machine prototypes.

Back to our scrapheap challenge. Next up: domestication.

Images:

We live on a remote island - mountainous, mid-Atlantic, still heavily forested and pretty wild - and for that reason nature sometimes sneaks into our otherwise technology-centred work. It is hard not to think local when you live in a place like this. We’re neither farmers nor pioneers - except in the sense that resident aliens on this island are few - but lately our reading has got us thinking about ancient paths and rural places. We’ll discuss the paths today and save most of the farm talk for a future post.

Paths v roads

In his 1969 essay ‘A Native Hill’, Wendell Berry - the American writer, farmer, activist, and ‘modern Thoreau’ - makes a useful distinction between paths and roads:

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand … embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape. … It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.

Aside from conversation as usual, the reason we are talking about Berry is the arrival of a new film, Look & See, and a new collection of his writing, The World-Ending Fire, edited by Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain Project fame. Berry and Kingsnorth, along with the economist Kate Raworth, were on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week recently chatting about the coming apocalypse and how it might best be avoided. It is a fascinating interview: you can actually hear Berry’s rocking chair creaking and the crows cawing outside the window of his house in Port Royal, Kentucky.

The normally optimistic Berry agrees somewhat crankily to read ‘the poem that you asked me to read’ on the programme. ‘Sabbaths 1989’ describes roads to the future as going nowhere: ‘roads strung everywhere with humming wire. / Nowhere is there an end except in smoke. / This is the world that we have set on fire.’ Berry admits that this poem is about as gloomy as he gets (‘blessed are / The dead who died before this time began’). For the most part his writing is constructive: forming a sensual response to cold, atomised modernity; advocating for conviviality, community, the commonweal.

Paul Kingsnorth talks compellingly in the same programme about transforming protest into action, although in truth no one walks the walk like Berry. Kingsnorth says: ‘We're all complicit in the things we oppose’ - and never were truer words spoken, from our iPhones to our energy use. In terms of design practice, there are worse goals than reducing our level of complicity in environmental harm and empty consumerism. Like Berry, Kingsnorth talks about paths and roads. He asks: ‘Why should we destroy an ancient forest to cut twelve minutes off a car journey from London to Southampton? Is that a good deal?’

It’s a fair question. It also illustrates perfectly what Berry was describing in the passage that started this post: the difference between paths that blend and coexist with the local landscape, preserving the knowledge and history of the land, and roads that cut straight through it. These roads are like a destructive and ill-fitting grid imposed from the centre onto the periphery, without attention to the local terrain or ecology or ways of doing things - both literally (in the case of energy) and figuratively.

Another book we read recently, Holloway, describes ancient paths - specifically the ‘holloways’ of South Dorset - in similar terms:

They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place & person to person.

Holloways are paths sunk deep into the landscape and into the local history. Roads, in contrast, skip over the local - collapsing time as they move us from one place to the next without, as it were, touching the ground. They alienate us in our comfort.

Here in Madeira there are endless footpaths broken through the woods. Still more unique are the levadas, the irrigation channels that run for more than two thousand kilometres back and forth across the island, having been brought to Portugal from antecedents in Moorish aqueduct systems and adapted to the specific terrain and agricultural needs of Madeira starting in the sixteenth century.

Both the pathways through the ancient laurel forests and the centuries-old levadas (which, though engineered, were cut by hand and still follow the contours and logic of the landscape) contrast with the highways and tunnels that represent a newer feat of human engineering since the 1970s. During his controversial though undeniably successful reign from 1978 to 2015 - he was elected President of Madeira a remarkable ten times - Alberto João Jardim oversaw a massive infrastructure program that completely transformed the island. Places that used to be virtually unreachable became accessible by a short drive. His legacy, in part, is a culture of automobile dependency that is second to none. The American highway system inspired by Norman Bel Geddes’ (and General Motors’) Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair almost pales in comparison to Jardim’s vision for the rapid modernisation of Madeira.

But when you walk the diesel-scented streets of the capital, or you drive through the holes bored deep into and out of towering volcanic mountains to reach the airport - and even when you think back in history and imagine those first settlers sitting in their ships as half the island’s forest burned, watching the dense smoke of the fires they lit to make Madeira favourable to human habitation - it’s hard not to think what a catastrophically invasive species are human beings.

Bespoke is a word we use a lot. In our vocabulary bespoke is not about luxury or excess - as it has been co-opted by consumer capitalism to suggest. Instead it is about tailored solutions, fitted to the contours of a particular body or landscape. Wendell Berry insists on the role of aesthetics and proportionality in his approach to environmentalism: the goal is not hillsides covered in rows of ugly solar panels, but an integrated and deep and loving relationship with the land. This insistence on aesthetics relates to the ‘reconfiguring’ principles that inform our newest work. The gravity batteries we’ve been building are an alternative not only to the imposed, top-down infrastructure of the grid, but also to the massive scale of such solutions and our desire to work with the terrain rather than against it.

Naomi Klein talked about renewable energy in these terms in an interview a couple of years ago:

If you go back and look at the way fossil fuels were marketed in the 1700s, when coal was first commercialized with the Watt steam engine, the great promise of coal was that it liberated humans from nature … And that was, it turns out, a lie. We never transcended nature, and that I think is what is so challenging about climate change, not just to capitalism but to our core civilizational myth. Because this is nature going, ‘You thought you were in charge? Actually all that coal you’ve been burning all these years has been building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat, and now comes the response.’ … Renewable energy puts us back in dialog with nature. We have to think about when the wind blows, we have to think about where the sun shines, we cannot pretend that place and space don’t matter. We are back in the world.

In a future post we will talk about the related subject of sustainable agriculture. But speaking of food - the time has come for our toast and coffee.

A little while back we mentioned a gravity battery we’re developing to solve issues stemming from grid control of energy. The battery, like other designs we’re exploring, works by exploiting our island’s vertical terrain, local materials, and expertise.

Energy, especially renewable energy, is topical at the moment. Last year was the hottest year on record. The effects of global warming, including melting sea ice, rising sea levels, and changing weather patterns, are increasing - as we are constantly being told - at an alarming rate. Faced with the impact of air pollution and climate change on daily life, China and India are making huge investments in renewable energy initiatives. Meanwhile, on the very day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, references to climate change were quietly purged from the official White House website. In the first week of his presidency, Trump introduced a dangerously retrograde ‘America first energy plan’ focused on promoting fossil fuels, and signed executive orders allowing renewed construction on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. And this is just the tip of the (Titanic?) iceberg.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Tory government and move towards Brexit also have strong negative implications for energy. As we wrote in a blog post last summer: ‘Constraints express a lack of control; they are basically the opposite of control. So taking back control means finding ways to remove constraints.’ But what does the much abused dream of freedom from constraints look like in 2017? Six months ago we saw Brexit as ‘a meticulously planned political remake of The Italian Job - a magnificent heist orchestrated to turn Britain into a libertarian super-state, Seasteading’s head office.’ That judgement seems more relevant than ever, perhaps even a bit optimistic. Such plans are now in the open - just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sinister proposal to copy the lower safety and emission standards of the US or even India (‘We could say, if it’s good enough in India, it’s good enough for here. There’s nothing to stop that.’). The UK’s global renewable energy standing has already fallen as a result of Brexit.

In the midst of increasingly disturbing global events we have quietly been making progress with our prototyping - with the view that action, however limited, is preferable to helpless hand-wringing and endless news scrolling. This has comprised several visits to our local motorcycle breaker, familiarising ourselves with local hardware stores, receiving an ancient lathe from the mainland and giving it a major service, and exploring local landscapes for suitable testing locations. We also had to learn to fly a drone for documentary footage.

To provide a simple explanation of the concept: the gravity battery is a storage device designed to be used with a variety of renewable energy generation methods. In our case, energy (provided by the abundant Madeiran sunshine) is captured by solar photovoltaics. This energy powers a motor, and with the help of a homemade gearbox is used to lift a fixed weight into the sky. (The real-life context could be, for example, one of the local homes we see built on the cliffsides of the island.) When it is needed the energy is released by dropping the weight, which in turn rotates the motor - now a generator - to produce electrical energy. The power available is determined by the size of the dropping mass, the speed at which it drops, the gearbox ratio, and the drop distance.

First iteration:

Based on an initial design by M-ITI Design PhD candidate Mohammed J. Ali, the first gravity battery used lathe gears and an off-the-shelf DC motor. In early testing we discovered that building a gearbox is relatively difficult, and that efficiency is largely dependent on very tight tolerances and hugely affected by the choice of drive train.* While the first iteration showed promise, it required too much mass to turn the gears - in excess of 30kg. We removed one gear train and managed to generate a steady 40W with a mass of 20kg, but it still descended too quickly. (Some investigation showed that the pulley belt final drive was very inefficient.)

The prototype was updated with CNC-machined aluminium side plates to ensure alignment of lathe-turned bearing holders and a motorcycle timing chain final drive to the DC motor. This last piece was rescued from a scrap Honda VF500, donated by our local bike breaker. We also experimented with bicycle gears, but these were less efficient than the timing chain and gears, which were designed for higher motorcycle speeds. With exactly the same gear ratios as the first iteration, this version comfortably descended with a mass of 10kg.

To communicate the concept of the prototype we recorded a short video. We had to think of a use for the generated energy, so we decided it would power a self-contained vinyl record player - the kind dads everywhere have been buying up recently with the aim of inflicting albums by the Pixies or the Smiths on their children. They’ve become so ubiquitous you can even buy them on our little island, which meant we could happily sidestep Amazon.

Here’s a video of this updated first iteration, filmed on the balcony of our local cafe. 

This set of experiments was incredibly insightful. The balcony has a drop of approximately 9 metres. The record player normally uses an adaptor to convert 220 volts of AC power to 9 volts DC. We built a regulator to limit developed energy. In the first test we dropped 20kg of water held in a typical water cooler container. It played the music perfectly but the drop time was only 1 minute 25 seconds, which was too short for any song on the album. In the second test we used 10kg of water, but it only generated 6 volts, which was not enough to power the record player.

If you know the story of the three bears, you’ll anticipate that the third test was just right. We borrowed the water jug from the cafe and added 5kg to the container, bringing the total to 15kg. Not only did it generate enough power to start the record player, the drop time was just short of 9 minutes; we managed to play the better part of Side 1 of the Johnny Cash album At Folsom Prison (1968). Success! We attached an electrical tester and observed that the output power varied significantly. This was related to the music: the louder we turned up ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the faster the weight dropped. This was surprising and instructive in itself.

Second iteration:

The next iteration aims to solve an important problem. Finding lathe gears and having access to a lathe limits the potential of easy access, so we had the idea of modifying a basic motorcycle for our experiments (ideally something around 125cc single cylinder). The main premise of this iteration is to reverse the purpose of the bike. Apologies for all the technical details, but in the interest of open knowledge here is a brief explanation:

Normally the bike engine burns fossil fuel (petrol) to move the piston down, which is converted to rotary motion with the crankshaft (every 4th stroke in our case)

Rotary motion (or RPM) is modified by the gearbox and ultimately rotates the rear wheel via a chain drive providing forward linear motion to the bike (and rider)

We reverse this situation: instead of fossil fuel, gravity spins the rear wheel using it as a pulley attached to the falling mass

This spins the drive sprocket, increasing RPM in the gearbox and finally driving the crankshaft at a speed determined by the selected gear, the diameter of the pulley, and the falling mass.

Motorcycles commonly generate electrical power (for the starter motor, lights, ignition, etc.) using a generator spinning on the end of the crankshaft. Unfortunately, in our case, the breaker had already sold on this key component before we received the donated bike. So we will test this ideal solution as soon as a complete scrap bike is found. For this iteration we use the same DC motor used in the first prototype.

Analysing the engine we noticed that the starter motor gears spin much faster than the crank - these operate in one direction to start the bike. With a bit of welding we solved this problem. We hacked into the engine cover to allow access for an output chain drive, and with some simple machining we converted the output drive to a timing gear. Next step - boil a kettle from the same balcony... 

Once the second iteration is complete, the gravity battery will be ready to progress to another major phase: adapting it to new terrains, materials, and expertise in other locations, and testing the concept in the wild (although our local cafe, it must be said, is pretty wild).