Unconsumption

Well: To be more specific, this Tumblr is saying goodbye, for now.

I dreamed up the word “unconsumption” back in 2007, for a New York Times Magazine column, and later pursued and refined the idea in various ways, most notably in this group Tumblr -- which grew way beyond what I imagined was possible. It’s been an amazing run, and an honor to work with a series of fantastic and inspiring collaborators along the way.

But I’m not going to turn this post into a long walk down memory lane, or a victory lap. I will just say briefly that it’s been wildly gratifying to see this Tumblr grow from nothing to more than 82,000 followers. My sincere thanks to you all!

As 2015 winds down, however, other commitments, etc., have made it clear that the Tumblr has to go on hiatus.

So: I hope you will check out the work of Molly Block, Deirdre Nelson, Shanna Trenholm, Brian W. Jones — all instrumental to this Tumblr and its history, and each doing fantastic things of their own. My public thanks and endless gratitude to them, and to everyone who has contributed to this Tumblr directly and indirectly over the years— too numerous to mention here.

Finally: None of this means that Unconsumption is “over” as an idea, of course. In fact, quite the contrary: Long live Unconsumption!

Thanks again!

Guatemala epicycles bicycles into pedal machines. via bbc.com:

What’s the point of a bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere? In one part of Guatemala, old bikes are being recycled into nifty pedal-powered machines.

For almost 20 years, the charity Maya Pedal has been converting bicycle parts donated from abroad into so-called “bicimaquinas”, or bicycle machines….

At first, the pedal technology was aimed at helping to make small-scale agriculture sustainable.

Now, at low cost, individuals are using it to create their own businesses without electricity and to reduce the physical effort of daily chores in the home.

Read more

swissmiss sez:

I was just in the market for a new trash bin but for some reason I missed the Totem Intelligent Waste System. Total bummer. I would have gone for this one. It looks good and comes with compartments for recycling, food waste, general trash, and storage for household items (like extra liners or cleaning products).  Smart!

Your urine may be of more use kept about your person. At least, that’s what a team of researchers from the University of the West of England think, because they’ve made a pair of socks that use the liquid to generate electricity.

The new sock contains a network of integrated tubes that can hold up to 648 milliliters of urine. The act of walking forces the liquid through microbial fuel cells, which contain bacteria that take delight in consuming the nutrients held in your pee, creating electricity in the process.

In a series of experiments, published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, the team shows that the socks are capable of powering a wireless transmitter which could broadcast a message every two minutes.

(via Researchers Have Made Socks That Use Urine to Create Electricity)

Designer/maker Daniel Moyer’s main material in his furniture designs is wood and he’s found a clever way to use up those pieces of scrap that he had laying around.

fdup.toys takes those solid wood pieces and turns them into playful, handmade toys, made just as his prototype and one-of-a-kind edition furniture pieces.

The furniture can sometimes take months of hard work to build and the toys are a nice, scaled back idea that can add some much needed fun to the shop.

More: Handmade Wooden Toys Made from Scrap Wood - Design Milk 

Autonomous robots to be used in keeping dust off solar panels in Israel’s biggest solar field, reports timesofisrael:

Most solar energy farms are located in deserts, where there is plenty of sunlight — which solar panels, of course, need a lot of. But the desert also has a lot of dust, which clogs up the photovoltaic components of the panels, making them less effective in collecting sunlight for conversion into energy.

Panels have to be cleaned on a regular basis, but water in the desert tends to be expensive, if available at all — and the use of water to clean the panels raises the costs of production, making solar power too expensive to be considered anything more than a novelty....

Instead of using water to clean panels, Ecoppia’s robot cleaners are equipped with microfibers, with each robot assigned to a row of PV panels. Using controlled air flow, the robots push the accumulated dirt off panels, as they glide along the surface of panels on their polyurethane-coated aluminum frame using wheels. Each robot can cover about 100 square feet of panel each minute, saving not only water, but time.

Read more. Via Solar Panel Cleaning Robots To Keep Panels Clean In Dessert #SolarPower « Adafruit Industries.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, it damaged more than a million housing units—half of which were in Louisiana. Houses and shops were submerged in more than 10 feet of water. In New Orleans, more than three-quarters of residents needed their homes repaired. Other buildings were gutted, remodeled, or simply demolished. New construction removed old materials in favor of more current ones.

To Alex Geriner, a New Orleans native and founder of Doorman Designs, that meant throwing out more than just scraps of wood. “The materials have a ton of history to them, and it kind of broke my heart to see all this stuff going to waste,” he says. “I realized there is a story there that needs to be saved.”

So he started making them into furniture, working with contractors and demolition companies to turn reclaimed wood and metal scraps into headboards, tables, chairs, and dressers. Some materials are salvaged from hurricane-damaged buildings, while others come from historic houses that are being renovated. Geriner says some of the wood he uses dates as far back as the 1800s, before the Civil War.

(via Doorman Designs Furniture Maker Turns Hurricane Katrina Rubble into Furniture - CityLab)

“Meet the Earthship” is a short film about an off-grid community living in houses made of rubbish outside of Taos, New Mexico.  ...

To solve the puzzle, Reynolds developed Earthships, a form of "biotecture" that uses natural and recycled materials to minimise their impact on the environment. Earthships are built with three principles in mind: They use natural and recycled materials, they supply their own power and water, and they can be built by anyone.

(via Meet the people living in off-grid homes made of rubbish | Design Indaba)

Scots fashion designers will transform piles of second-hand clothes into catwalk collections as part of a campaign against waste.

After fending off tough competition, designer Aimee Kent and Black Cherry Studios were picked for the challenge by Zero Waste Scotland and the Salvation Army Trading Company.

The initiative, part of the Love Your Clothes campaign, will see designers embark on a 12-week project to create two new couture collections from 150 kilos of unwanted garments they have been handed into charity shops or dropped off in donation bins.

More: Video: Scots fashion designers battle waste by taking clothes from scrapheap to catwalk (From Evening Times)

Here's a really cool submission from Studio Habeas Corpus. THE BIRD DRESS PROJECT — new wings for used t-shirts:

> The Bird is a unisex tunic which anyone can make from 5 used T-shirts, using a downloadable pattern

> it was designed to create an easy, comfortable garment one would want to wear every day while keeping textiles out of landfills

> we recommend using old T-shirts you were willing to donate (the ones that work best are thick 100% cotton basic T-shirts), or asking for your friends & family to donate theirs to you.

> purchasing second-hand T-shirts from thrift stores is also a good option, however keep in mind that at this stage, the large majority of donated clothing has already gone out of the country to be resold internationally, which represents a big carbon footprint and uncertain futures > by making The Bird dress with materials you already have, you are being gentle to the earth and to yourself

More: BIRD DRESS - studio habeas corpus. Pattern downloadable on etsy and kollabora

More about Studio Habeas Corpus:

 A research & design studio focused on materiality and the body - through dress, architecture, dance, & history. Our goal is to bring to life a gentler, low-tech material world, through information & collaboration. http://www.studiohabeascorpus.com/

The simple act of throwing paper into a bin became the inspiration for Nikolas Gregory Studio’s Scrap Stool. The New York-based art and design studio approached paper companies and asked that their employees throw away scrap paper into trash cans that had been filled with slow drying glue – the result was an upcycled stool made of repurposed paper waste.

More: A production-ready stool made out of industrial paper waste and a bit of glue | Design Indaba

In smaller rooms of both Galerie Lelong and Andrea Rosen Gallery, Ono’s 1966 “Mend Piece” is restaged with long tables cluttered with broken cups and plates, and scissors, tape, rubber cement, and string all available to attempt to reassemble the fragments into a new whole.

“Mend with wisdom mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time,” the wall text states. 

Interesting side note:

Curiously, both of these stations are also joined by espresso bars serving coffee in Ono’s Illy collaboration cups, where gold lines represent the mended cracks from catastrophic events, from Hiroshima to Guernica. The coffee is intended as encouragement to linger, and to give the space the sense of community, but it also has an odd commercialism contrast to the anti-material works.

More: Yoko Ono Asks Gallery Visitors to Repair the Impossibly Broken

France-based, eco-friendly home decor company Plastiketic unveiled the Kuskus, a rocking chair made from 36 upcycled PET bottles.  The bottles are slightly inflated with air to ensure maximum comfort and, if problems arise, they can be easily replaced at home.

Designed by Grégory Hoogstoel, the Kuskus is usable both indoors and outdoors. The frame of the rocking chair is made from sustainable spruce collected from a sustainable wood forest in France.

“All our products are eco-designed, limit the impact on the environment, and are enrolled in a process of upcycling, a process that involves transforming waste into a new product of superior quality,” says the company website.

Alaska salmon leather and performance wear made of crab shell fibre are not items commonly found in the wardrobe, but Alaskan start-up Tidal Vision chose clothing manufacture as the next creative way to repurpose and upcycle the two billion pounds of waste generated by the seafood industry in the country.

The company is out to combat the waste issue by purchasing seafood byproducts from sustainable fisheries and using it to create various textiles. The company also hopes to give small seafood businesses a leg up by injecting additional revenue from the sale of their waste products.

(via A clothing line made of seafood waste | Design Indaba)

For a British couple who wanted to live among the birch trees, blue bells, and streams of the gorgeous New Forest National Park in southern England, a custom prefab mobile home was the perfect solution—and the only kind of new construction allowed in the protected conservation area.

As Dwell first spotlights, local practice PAD Studio masterminded the dreamy 1,430-square-foot spread, which was prefabricated off-site "down to the ceiling fans and limestone countertops" over the course of the five months. Arriving on site by a crane (the same way it could be transported later on) , the airy home was built to Passivhaus standards standards.

There are ultra-insulating, triple-glazed windows throughout the home, as well as a 3.8-kW rooftop PV array and rainwater harvesting system.

A new book, Material Innovation: Packaging Design, written by a material science consultant and a design consultant, explores the ways that packaging is being changed by innovations in retail, materials, design, and marketing.

The authors have organized the book around thematic case studies: "Functional Forms," "Dispensing Systems," and "Interactive," and use these to illuminate the way that online shopping, environmental consciousness and new emphasis on design are changing packaging from something you throw away to something that you admire, re-use, or that literally vanishes during the product's normal use.

(via The new world of packaging design: green, communicative, tailored / Boing Boing)

Alchemy of Waste is a collective that seeks to redefine our perception of trash through collaborative, multimedia film projects.

With a combined background in film, visual art, sustainability and waste management, founders Kamee Abrahamian and Katelyn Partlow call attention to our culture of consumption and waste by submitting their documentaries and films about upcycling to popular film festivals. ...

The founders try to spread the message of “a waste-not wonderland.”

(via Alchemy of Waste fosters a “waste-not wonderland” through arts-based projects | Design Indaba)