"Creative Upcycling: Reconnecting people, materials and place through making"

intro

• short ‘product lives’ and disposable packaging result in premature disposal of valuable resources

• industrialisation, mass production and global supply chains have resulted in a disconnect between people, places, materials and design

• upcycling is designed to increase value

• consider the contexts in which Upcycling occurs motivations and barriers

• make the future lives of objects contingent on context and culture

• social, economic and environmental benefit

• WW2’s increasing mechanisation, automation and productive efficiency enabled production of consumer goods, created consumerist culture

• technological innovation decreased but product reliability increased, reducing need for upgrade and replacement.

• so capitalists looked to increase profit through hyper consumption

• marketing people looked to trends and styles to encourage replacing items before they wore out

• start of planned obsolescence - functional, aesthetic and technological (Lilley et al., 2016; London, 1932; Packard, 1967)

• the concept of product lifetime, and shortening it

• ‘even the language of purchasing goods in the English language changed with the rise of the consumer. The word ‘customer’ had always implied some degree of regular and continuing relationship to a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract figure in a more abstract market. In contrast, consumption is derived from the French consumere to take up completely, devour, waste, spend (Williams, 1985)

• no incentive to learn how products work, and discourages regular maintenance and mending (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Gregson et al., 2009; Salvia et al., 2015)

• need to nurture new kinds of relationships with possessions - creative, productive relationships

• a Circular Economycc74a9 can be effective when materials are truly recycled, as opposed to down-cycled with a related loss in material quality, material purity and material valuec1ca8b

• circular economy strives for the decoupling of production from material inputs

• recycling consumes significant amounts of energy in transportation and processing, as does manufacturing using the recovered materials03a3f8

• incremental gains insufficient, with continued economic growth anything short of absolute decoupling will be obliterated by exponential growth and rising population 49d657

• another method is slower throughput, which extends and slows cycles of consumption8c1000 and has direct parallels with the slow food and slow research movementsa08152

• Recent approaches to transitioning to a circular economy have primarily been ‘top down’, aiming to inform and influence designers, manufacturers and ‘waste’ (resource) management companiesbd81a0

• ownership and disposal giving way to leasing, maintenance and remanufacturing

• the role of the citizen changes from ‘consumer’ to ‘user’961689

• the citizen is removed from the material world on which they rely

• “treasured possessions becoming depersonalised services”

• term upcycling originated in the 1990s

• Two extremes - driven by necessity for shelter and clothing vs as a hobby, art or craft

• economic, cultural and geographic context in which upcycling takes place influences the availability of raw materials, the end goal, creative influences and skills used

• despite precise design and engineering, the value of packaging drops immediately on purchase

• packaging has a very short life span and little status as an object of value, is discarded well before it has degraded or loses its function

• this research team explored the cultural relationships people local to Newcastle have with these kinds of material objects in a café built from discarded packaging

• focused on the socio-cultural-economic aspects of human-material object relationships and the power that inspiring, innovative design solutions have to prompt imaginative new solutions

• identifying the social, cultural, political and economic barriers that obstruct widespread upcycling in affluent societies

• Ad-hoc upcycling has always been a part of human life - consider the first flint/bone tools

• people with very limited resources in many contexts practice creative reuse of other peoples’ waste often as a means of survival

• ‘informal housing’ (Das, 2012).

• People are dependent on the availability of natural and manufactured resources in their local area

• During World War II, upcycling activities were strongly encouraged by governments and supported a wider drive to optimise the use of limited resources (Witkowski, 2003)

• (hence also post-war consumptions as no-longer-at-war luxurious ‘reward’ or ‘earned’ right)

• textile shortages particularly encouraged creativity

• promoting upcycling cultures requires a sound insight into the different sets of human motivations and values in play, in different temporal and geographical contexts

• local spread, word of mouth vs global and online movements

  • eg www.co-oproduct.org
  • www.ikeahackers.net

• still niche despite availability of resources, lack of cultural buy-in

• what would motivate? what are benefits?

• the projects often require specialist skills, equipment, tools, space and time (Coote et al., 2010)

• can be supported by use of easily available materials, a shared ‘open source’ design,

• scope for a small business to provide an upcycling service for those lacking time, skill or inclination

• issues of cleanliness and hygiene, so called ‘contaminated interaction’ (Baxter et al., 2017) a barrier for upcycling many forms of waste, or limits the application of the resulting objects

• designs shared openly often lack the reassurance of safety and fit for purpose

• designing objects intentionally for reuse, eg pre-drilled extra holes in furniture

• 3D printing supposedly more accessible to the public but that’s not strictly true

• importance of sharing and trading waste in community to have the correct components

• duplicates of things often needed, how to find compatible parts or make things compatible

• lack of time a very common barrier. Shorter working weeks for the environment y’all

• ‘earthships’ a reuse method for building houses, since the 70s, not entered mainstream. I think personally there’s an association there with rich hippies more than reuse and waste, a cultural stigma. And lack of uptake by commercial building companies

• the ‘waste problem is one of thought and cultural categorisation rather than of materiality’ (Fry and Willis, 1996)

• car boot sales, eBay, marketplace, gumtree, freecycle all in common use but have a value/standard/capital motive as much as reuse. Not easy to trade in waste materials/bulk/indeterminate materials through these methods

• reclaimed timber and stone costs more due to labour

• “Natural materials, with their inherent variability, surface complexity, and resilience (Hoadley, 2000; Pye, 1968), avoid a clear distinction between ‘shiny and new’ and ‘worn’, and are perhaps better suited to long term reuse (Lilley et al., 2016), (Bridgens et al.,2015)”

• ‘scratch-free world of slick polymers’ (Chapman, 2013) doesn’t take as well to ‘damage’, abrasion etc, commonly results in dissatisfaction

• for construction industry, proposal of large scale upcycling solutions (Jongert et al., 2011; van Hinte et al., 2007) use identify local waste resources using ‘harvest maps’

• building regulations make reuse difficult as the rules are designed for conventional new materials

• putting reuse upstream as part of the industrial process, design-for-reuse (Richardson, 2011)

• ‘plastic bottle building’ in Taiwan (www.miniwiz.com), a rare example of large scale, high quality construction using waste, but the interlocking for structural integrity required reprocessing of the plastic bottles

• ‘second lives’ prescribed by the designer not the same as designing for potential and allowing material repurposing

• more modularity = more potential

• enabling different objects and materials to be easily joined

• ‘Upcycling has the potential to transform the way we consider individual products, as assemblages of functional component modules with multiple life spans rather than complete stand-alone objects with singular finite lives’ (Richardson, 2011).”

• wanting to understand why certain material objects appear to lose their value in certain contexts, but not in others.

• ‘the process of consumption is motivated by complex emotional drivers.’(Chapman, 2009)

• ‘its strength characteristics derived from the design expertise of the civil engineering and architecture students.’ - so with the right people/the right skills you can effectively reuse even the most ephemeral of materials

• tips efficiency/usage on its head, it is best to use more- “Because the material is freely available, the ‘efficient’ use of materials ceases to be a design constraint, and hence large quantities of weak materials can be used to create a sufficiently strong structure. ”

• “Materials were joined such that they could easily be disassembled for recycling at the end-of-life of the structure.”

• many don’t realise that cardboard can hold weight

• concerns about using other peoples’ ‘waste’ as a construction material

• where new and old materials exist, who is building for who and who has access to the sturdier materials, will reuse continually be split along existing lines of oppression

• Storage of materials a concern for some

• efficiency of primary function compromised by hope of further use?

• hidden labour of cleaning and transporting materials

• how to achieve connectivity between a wide range of materials and objects

• in business - one company creatively recycling another company’s packaging in a chain

• Production and manufacturing was ‘once visible in the built fabric of cities and towns’ (Carr and Gibson, 2015).

• this individuality of crafted non-mass-produced object is still valued today (Pye, 1968), just are expensive to make and acquire

• self-expression through personal objects limited by lack of knowledge on care and maintenance and repair and crafting, cheap mass-production wins

• resource efficiency should not be regarded as a top-down activity, forced upon people

• “Current approaches to ‘design for the circular economy’ (The Great Recovery, 2013b) are based on design for disassembly, design for remanufacture and modular design within carefully designed flows of reuse, with the aim of retaining monetary value for the manufacturer and others in the supply chain. The challenge when designing for creative upcycling is to imbue an object with potential for imaginative reuse by individuals.”

• A crucial dimension of upcycling centers on the imagination of individuals and how this motivates and inspires them to embrace the ‘hidden’ potential of objects.

• allowing people to shape the world around them

• ‘inconsistent availability of materials and uncertainty of the required outcome would be seen as a difficulty or failing in the proposed system’

• vs innovative solutions arising from limited resources!

• variability of resource flows driving creative solutions (Das,2012)

References

• (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013b; The Great Recovery, 2013a, 2013b)
• (Bjørn and Hauschild, 2012; McDonough and Braungart, 2002)
• (Cooper, 1994; Ross and Evans, 2003)
• (Hobson, 2013; Meadows et al., 2005).
• (Botta, 2016)
• (Adams et al., 2014; Jones et al., 2003)
• (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015; The Great Recovery, 2013b).
• (Macarthur, 2013)