Let’s Grow Some Furniture: Botanical Manufacturing

April 22, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Random, Trees, Wood, Woodworking

Botanical Manufacturing

“An ingenious British designer has come up with the ultimate environmentally-friendly way to create stunning household furniture – by letting Mother Nature do all the hard work. Gavin Munro grows young trees into specially-designed plastic moulds, pruning and guiding the branches into shape before grafting them together to form ultra-tough joints. Using this method he’s already created several prototype pieces and has a field in Derbyshire where he’s currently tending a crop of 400 tables, chairs and lampshades which he hopes to harvest next year.”

botanical manufacturing 4“You start by training and pruning young tree branches as they grow over specially made formers. At certain points we then graft them together so that the object grows in to one solid piece – I’m interested in the way this is like a kind of organic 3D printing that uses air, soil and sunshine as its source material. After it’s grown into the shape we want, we continue to care and nurture the tree as it thickens and matures before harvesting it in the Winter and then letting it season and dry.”

“Each of the pieces have grown from one tree, planted specifically for that reason, its limbs guided in an exact shape and later grafted together to produce the unique pieces of furniture, which he hopes are the pioneers of a new method of sustainable, efficient and ecologically aware production.”

See & Read more:

Via Unconsumption.

Turning the Soil with a Bicycle Handlebar

April 18, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Farming, Hand tools

The agricultural tool shown in this video is pure genius. However, as some readers on our Facebook-page have noted, turning the soil disrupts soil organisms and brings more weeds. Another human-powered tool, the broadfork, loosens the soil without turning it. Thanks to Jean Armstrong Nick and Austin Liu.

The Case For Dangerous Roads and Low-tech Cars

April 18, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Cars, Low-tech cars, Random

car accident in poland wikipedia commons

“The design of automobiles has tended toward insulation, offering an ever less involving driving experience. The animating ideal seems to be that the driver should be a disembodied observer, moving through a world of objects that present themselves as though on a screen. We have throttle by wire, brake by wire, and electrical assist (versus hydraulic assist) brakes, as well as traction control and anti-lock brakes that modulate our driving inputs for us. What all this idiot-proofing and abstraction amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver.”

“What’s more, the information that does get through is presented in a highly mediated way, conveyed by potentiometers and silky smooth servos rather than by the seat of your pants. It is therefore highly discreet, and does not reflect fuzzy, subtle variations. Nor is it sensitive to changes that haven’t been anticipated and coded for ahead of time, for example the vibration that might arise from a brake caliper bracket that has come loose or cracked. Perhaps most troubling, the electronic mode of presentation means that information about the state of the car and of the road is competing with information from other electronic devices that may be a lot more interesting.”

Read more: The Case for Dangerous Roads and Low-Tech Cars, Matthew B. Crawford. Picture credit.

Metals Used in High-Tech Products Face Future Supply Risks

April 8, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Metals, minerals, materials, Random, Recycling

In a new paper, a team of Yale researchers assesses the “criticality” of all 62 metals on the Periodic Table of Elements, providing key insights into which materials might become more difficult to find in the coming decades, which ones will exact the highest environmental costs — and which ones simply cannot be replaced as components of vital technologies.

the criticality of 62 metalsMany of the metals traditionally used in manufacturing, such as zinc, copper, and aluminum, show no signs of vulnerability. But other metals critical in the production of newer technologies — like smartphones, infrared optics, and medical imaging — may be harder to obtain in coming decades, said Thomas Graedel, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and lead author of the paper.

“Some metals that have become deployed for technology only in the last 10 or 20 years are available almost entirely as byproducts. You can’t mine specifically for them; they often exist in small quantities and are used for specialty purposes. And they don’t have any decent substitutes.”

The researchers also analyzed how recycling rates have evolved over the years and the degree to which different industries are able to utilize “non-virgin” sources of materials. Some materials, such as lead, are highly recycled because they are typically used in bulk, Graedel said. But the relatively rare materials that have become critical in some modern electronics are far more difficult to recycle because they are used in such miniscule amounts — and can be difficult to extricate from the increasingly complex and compact new technologies.

“I think these results should send a message to product designers to spend more time thinking about what happens after their products are no longer being used,” he said. “So much of what makes the recycling of these materials difficult is their design.”

Read more: Study: Metals Used in High-Tech Products Face Future Supply Risks, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Cargo Cults

April 5, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Art, Technology

supercargo headphones“The John Frum movement on the Oceanic island nation Vanuatu is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”— many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas.

Cargo cults appear when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes. The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world.

To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region started building giant airplanes from wood, carving headphones and radios from bamboo and awaited the messianic serviceman John Frum. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy. Their rituals included the non militant army TAU (Tanna Army USA), marching with wooden rifles.

supercargo 2The more naive will laugh about these imitations. But did the US soldiers truly understand their technology, their big agenda? The cult of the cargo is our world exactly: We perform meaningless routines we call work, in hope for future cargo. With a technology that could navigate us to the moon, we write LMAO. The western world itself is a giant cult of imitating things that somehow work: dressing in suits, using buzzword-vocabulary, mimicing old forms of art. The longing for godlike goodies on the horizon, the usage of things we don´t understand: it’s a big parable of desire.

Surprisingly the local performers of the Cargo Cults succeeded: By remaking western technology with bamboo, by re-enacting western rituals they attracted actual planes full of tourists and anthropologists.”

Quoted from “In John they trust” (Smithsonian Magazine) and “The supercargo manifesto” (Supercargo Tumblr). Pictures: Supercargo Tumblr. Thanks to Edwin Gardner.

A Washing Machine for Life

April 5, 2015 by kris de decker Filed Under: Laundry, Random, Repair, Trash, Washing machines

washing machine for life 2“L’Increvable (which means indestructable in French) is the concept of a washing machine whose lifespan is fifty years. Gone are the days when your washing machine had an abrupt end of life after 5 years of use because of a single bearing.

With L’Increvable you change each component when needed. You don’t have to be a handy(wo)man: the Increvable website guides you through each component maintenance thanks to well-documented tutorials and each new component is delivered with proper tools.

You buy the washing machine in flat-pack form and then you assemble it yourself : it gives you the opportunity to get to know the machine. The traditional 30 kg (60 lbs) of cement ballast are replaced by a water tank. The latter is automatically filled during the first use of the machine. This means that the machine can be made lighter again when it needs to be moved.

By removing all highly technical and hardly replaceable parts from the structure and built with such specifications from the ground up, the Increvable is destined to be easily manipulable by the mere user. The missing technologic parts (i.e. touchable screen) do change the User Experience in a very fundamental way, giving maybe to some of us a certain old school feel to the tech but adds several dozens of years before obsolescence as a result.”

See & read more: 1 / 2 / 3. Thanks to Christopher Santerre.