Thursday, April 15, 2010

Materials- Sustain- Working with Wool and Project Updates

I find myself really getting into all the different things you can do with just wool. There are so many techniques and forms you can do with it to change it and alter it. I am going to have to pull myself away soon in order to work with some of the other material samples for the project.

Below is what I have done so far with wool (knit, crochet, crochet 3d forms, macrame, spun and made discs to test stiffeners) I plan to take this a little farther and try the different ways of felting it and see what I can come up with


As for the project it is coming along. I decided I wanted to work with the quote "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and I am currently working on a "7 apple containment device". I don't really know what else to call it right now. 


 Fake Fruit for Maquettes (i didn't know fake fruit was so expensive!!)


 Mini crochet prototype

Some Notes on Sustainable Design Readings

Design Activism-
- nature looked vast in the late 18th century-- ripe for exploitation
- the resources to sustain life like agriculture are decreasing
- micro-utopias and make impossible before possible now
- fill the gap between poverty around the world
- Design Prism: Design Practice, Design Studies, and Design Exploration
     - more then one facet to a design, it is about the design coming together as a whole
- "overconsumers"- the rich 20% that has so much mass and waste that it is contaminating the whole

Cradle to Cradle-
-just because something is "less bad"  for the environment doesn't make it good
- the problem is still there it just exists in a different form.
-mass customerization, making products for the masses they can create make their own
- is the industrial revolution bad?
    - hasn't changed since the beginning
         - make it as cheap and as many as possible
- how can be draw on the fundamentals of the preindustrial revolution and the good of industrial revolution
- "biomimicry"- using the designing the efficiency of nature
- the preindustrial idea of making stuff, take the ideal and bring it into the 20th century, use the digital to make the crafts of the old
- consumerism in a capitalist society
- planned obsolecence
- one- off objective vs. mass producted
- "we are a capitalist society and nothing is going to change that"
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories
- zero waste can save money
- even a small change can make a big change