Designing Waste

Why do we reject the notion of waste as ours? Why do we seem to  deny that it as a trace of who we are, what we do, and where we live. Waste is something woefully undesigned which is at best “managed” but not curated or crafted. Waste is the inevitable phase of all things, but we fixate on the virile and thriving incarnations of our products as the singular reality. If, in an ultimate universe, we designed for more beautiful waste, we might actually cultivate a far more utopian present.  This week I designed with the ultimate end point in mind. In examining the relationships between mother and child I started thinking about traces- inelegant traces that I wished to redesign and stumbled on the diaper dilemma. Diapers are the third largest item in US landfills today and they will not decompose for hundreds of years. (1)

There is nothing glamorous about America’s waste system. We fear our waste on a mass level (and perhaps on a personal level) and do little to make it palatable to us. We must reconstruct the narrative around our waste, understanding that we build systems and products which are imprinted with our own neuroses. Products that are only conceived of in a fixed state of their prime will never amount to good waste, which is not an oxymoron, but rather an objective.

I referred to The Missing Link: Architecture and Waste Management by Leire Asensio Villoria, Hanif Kara, Andreas Georgoulias which examined the protracted lack of architecture in our garbage systems. Just like our waste, the buildings that house these systems are under designed and concealed from us. The authors discuss recent attempts to incorporate multiple functions into plants as a means to incorporate them into the community. These efforts are few and far between however and the majority of waste plants are fields of garbage covered in soil. One day we will build homes on these brown sites, or maybe even schools, until then we are avoid them and forget. Asensio, Villoria, Kara and Georgoulias write what is escaping us by neglecting the realities of our waste system:

“A few quick calculations demonstrate the opportunity that lies before us, and what we stand to lose if we don’t act now. If the United States converted all its waste into energy, every year it would be able to heat 10 million homes, power 14 million homes, reduce coal extraction by 100 million tons... On the other hand, if the current trajectory holds, the country will continue losing precious resources, as well as perpetuate environmental and health risks.”

There is greater function at play besides our own innate dislike of waste. Ideologically speaking, to employ Althusser’s writing- we are subconsciously compelled to consume by an apparatus that is immutable within modern Capitalist society.

Architecture enshrines what we care about. While we build meccas to commerce, and temples to government we neglect our waste systems. Ultimately this indicates that we have little concern for this arena in our societies and until we imagine new structures to elevate waste, we will suffer from our own inability to reconsider our relationship with the world’s refuse.

Turning to Althusser, it’s clear that Ideological State Apparatuses imposed on us that render us subjects of our own wasteful patterns. Althusser’s ideological premise is based on Marxist means of production. He writes …” it is not conceivable that… a new mode of production implying determinate forces of production and relations of production, could do without a social organization of production and corresponding ideological forms.” The ideological forms support the behavior that render a society of production and commerce.

While we are subjects of this ISA, our products do not compel us otherwise. Instead of materials that are durable or treasured we are surrounded by objects delicately hovering on the precipice of decay. Cheap materials are their own affordances, creating a relationship between user and product that indicates their impermanence. Anti-signifiers like Chrome or Gold are signs to users that these items should be salvaged, or protected.

Popular narratives are obsessed by the Future. But the representation of this positive horizon is nearly always without the burden of waste incurred from our past selves. The Future isn’t truly about the new. The Future as it’s popularly represented is about a potential time where our  pressing and current anxieties are absolved in some utopian neverland. Until we actually design waste and revolt from the subjectivity of numbing consumerism we will always be burdened with the realities of our own most unpleasant embodiments; the inevitable trace of our discarded belongings.

References

Gifford, Dawn. “Why Disposable Diapers Are Dirty and Dangerous.” Small Footprint Family. Accessed September 6, 2016. http://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/dangers-of-disposable-diapers

Villoria, Leire Asensio., Kara, Hanif., Georgoulias, Andreas. “The Missing Link: Architecture and Waste Management.” Harvard Design Magazine. Accessed September 6, 2016. http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/40/the-missing-link-architecture-and-waste-management

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2013. (excerpt)

Althusser, Louis. “Selected Texts” in Ideology: An Introduction. Ed. Terry Eagleton. New York: Longman. 1994