Humblefacture

The is the first in an ongoing exploration of Ecotopic Design frameworks. This collection of plants co-habitate in a self supporting ecology. They can be harvested to produce wooden structural members of standardized dimension, low-stretch fiber for making thread, dye for coloring the thread, and a polysacharide gum resin for glue.

Once bent into shape, the structure is bound together with thread using a custom-designed open source binding tool. Then the bound joints are solidified by infusion with the resin. The resulting structure is sturdy and aesthetically coherent, without requiring any non-ecosystemically-derived materials.

While working in the materials research group of Kieran Timberlake Architects in Philadelphia, I was part of a small team which developed a prototype pre-fabricated home for the Home Delivery show at MOMA New York.

The Cellophane concept revolved around the idea that you could fully re-purpose the Rexroth aluminum extrusion structural members, and re-cycle all other material components. So, when your family size changed - because of a new child, or grown kids going to college - you could simply down-size your house, and re-sell the structural components on the existing market for these extruded aluminum members.

Conceived as a sort of performance-art mobile making project, The Production Cycle was funded by a grant from 4Culture, and was built out as a bike-portable mobile sewing shop which traveled around to farmer's markets around the Puget Sound and produced free bags for market patrons using waste materials from businesses local to each market.

The goal of the project was to challenge people's assumptions about what localism in physical products meant, even as they had accepted the value of localism in food.