Proximity Living - r[e]cycle
Today our planetary-scale systems make it so that objects come and go under mysterious circumstances. Cars and trains either run or someone else fixes them. The objects in our lives are shipped to us from faraway lands, and they work until they don’t. Discarded, they get hauled away in the early morning by stinky trucks to landfills and recycling centers. Wast and its disposal are traditionally supposed to remain as invisible as possible.
Instead, we will speculate on an Anti-NIMBY future where waste systems are entangled with residential architecture in direct proximity to where we live, similar to how “human infrastructure is now deeply entangled with the environment in the age of the Anthropocene”. We will reimagine our living spaces to incorporate, understand, and maintain these infrastructure systems in order to take this pollution and waste out of the invisible back alleys and into our living room walls. This incorporation of tactical changes in small pieces that might include tanks of plastic-eating bacteria or fungi, waste to biogas facility, carbon capture and sequestration, wastewater treatment, industrial composting, or soi remediation, can then be used as a generative potential for design so that we may effect change in the city as a whole.
E-Waste Recyle System Diagram
Gameplay Instructions: User Mode & Engineering Mode
The decentralized systems will be thought of in terms of their inputs and outputs to run, the design interventions introduced into the living space, and the data collection and system maintenance interface for the tenant and/or the building engineer. Each group will, through VR, design the interaction between system and user and in effect gamify the maintenance of these decentralized waste management nodes.
Team: Sean Meng, Aili Hu, Manan Vikam, Dhwani Shah
Instructor: Laure Michelon