From trash to treasure
I had a thought today I believe is relevant enough to share. What makes a material desirable ?
Let me give you some context, because this question is too broad to tackle as it is.
My father is an artist at heart and an architect by profession. I am a product designer, currently finishing my thesis major at OCAD University in Toronto. Since the beginning of the pandemic I moved back to Montreal, to my parents home, to pursue my studies remotely. I decided to ask my father if I could share his workshop space with him to be able to keep prototyping my ideas. At school I was focusing on digital products, like building apps, which are very cool, but not what I am passionate about. I love working with my hands and touch matter. That dialogue, I believe, builds a much more intimate relationship with materials and helps me design products supported by rich insights.
Through my studies at OCAD I discovered the concept of circular design. Circular design is the idea of using waste streams of an industry as raw material for another industry, hence keeping materials in circulation through production and consumption cycles. I always thought of recycling and sustainability theories as limiting processes in life. As Barney would say " New is always better ", but I learned we were both very wrong. I finally understood that circular design is about making the most out of the resources we already have extracted, it is about rejoicing in the abundance of surplus matter our society generates.
The most significant monuments our modern civilization built are not skyscrapers but massive landfills. I find that extremely desolate considering the jewels our ancestors left us. Not to mention the wars and conflicts caused by extraction of these materials and the exploitation of foreign labourers to make products that end up in the garbage after one use. It feels so wrong. We are degenerating our society through bad habits of production and consumption. So how can we change that ? How can we diminish landfill pollution ? How can we maximize reuse of products instead of carelessly throwing them away? Because, in reality, there is no such thing as away. As Antoine Lavoisier would say " Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. " Let's transform waste into something wonderful, useful and if we're lucky even beautiful !
As I started collecting glass bottles, plastic bottles and various broken furniture I found on the streets, my father's workshop was getting inundated with trash. As you can imagine my parents were not happy with the fact that their basement was starting to smell and look like a landfill. To me though it did not feel that way at all. I fell in love with the trash I collected. I saw only potential. I got attached to the liquor bottles, I admired their various shapes. I researched the various materials and was amazed by the qualities of glass and plastics. I acquired an incredible amount of knowledge on material properties. I decomposed the broken furniture in pieces and started imaging the parts assembled differently to create new furniture, transforming a chair into a bookcase, for example. I will detail my explorations in further blog posts. But to answer my first question, what makes a material desirable is the love you give to it. It depends on the amount of care and attention you choose to give something that will make it incredible. Nothing deserves to end up in a landfill, everything has potential, everything deserves a second chance to live with dignity.
