A-BT001, artifact reduced to actions | jĂşlia & jĂşlia
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Júlia Carrasco Júlia Claveria Mentored by Robert Thomson 4th GEDI Projects II
ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering 2_
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“Almost every functional artifact can be reduced to actions.� Artifact A-BT is an open-source do-it-yourself beer tap that transforms an expensive and
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high maintenance object into a simple one, so that it can be accessible to everyone.
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hi, We are JĂşlia&JĂşlia, young designers based in Barcelona, influenced by the emergent culture of new future scenarios in the field of sustainability and social upcoming ways of seeing the world.
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ARTIFACT MOVEMENT A
BEER TAP ARTIFACT A-BT
OUR BEER TAP MODEL A-BT_001
A Artifact is another way of producing; an answer to an emergent culture of makers; an alternative movement to the mass production model that has become unsustainable for future scenarios. A-BT Artifact is thought to replace quotidian objects whose main function can be solved easily with material and other objects all of us have around. thus doubling their funtionality and bringing them back to life. A-BT_001 This is our beer tap; the one that we have achieved following the basic actions specified, with the material we have had around these days. If we did it again time after, we would have other material and it would look different.
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content_ Yochai Benkler p.9 + Ezio Manzini p.11 + John Thackara p.13 + movement p.15 + industrial mass production p.16 + crisis & paradigm shift p.17 + emerging civilization p.20 + challenges p.23 + manifesto p.24 + artifact p.30 + conventional BT p.34 + elemental BT p.35 + Daniel Bernoulli p.36 + siphon principle p.37 + actions A-BT p.38 + A-BT decalogue p.39 + A-BT001 p.40 + scaffoldings p.46 + structure p.49 + BCN street furniture p.50 + material p.53 + BCN map material location p.55 + A-BT001 p.56 + the experience p.62 + storyboard p.64 + new scenarios p.66 + bibliography p. 70
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Yochai
Benkler
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society. Yochai Benkler has been called “the leading intellectual of the information age.� He proposes that volunteer-based projects such as Wikipedia and Linux are the next stage of human organization and economic production.
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“Traditional economics, shaped by industrial norms, has failed to explain the emerging pattern of open production”. Against this context, Benkler introduces the concept of commons-based peer production(^1) driven by nonmonetary(^2) and non-proprietary incentives.
*1. By "commons-based peer production" he means any one of a wide range of collaborative efforts we are seeing emerging on the net in which a group of people engages in a cooperative production enterprise that effectively produces information goods without price signals or managerial commands. The most widely known example is free or open source software, such as the GNU/Linux operating system or the Apache webserver. *2. Non-monetary motivations are what make you stop on the street for a moment to answer a stranger who asks you for the time or directions; what makes you travel five hundred miles to be with your family for the holidays, and what makes you tell a friend a joke, or listen to it. They are also the motivations that lead some of the world’s leading minds to work for what, by comparison to other lines of business in which they could succeed, is a pittance – to satisfy their curiosity, for fame, or because of the sheer fun.
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Ezio
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Ezio Manzini is an Italian design strategist, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) network of universitybased design labs. His work over the past 30 years in sustainability and social innovation has coalesced around four watchwords: small, local, open and connected. Ezio has explored design potentialities in different fields. His most recent book is “Design, When Everybody Designs�, MIT Press 2015.
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“Localised low-scale production, selfproduction of goods, micro-factories and distributed energy generation are possible today thanks to thechnological innovations that in distributed systems(^4) cannot be separated from social innovation. “We are witnessing a wave of social innovations, an expansive open codesign process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. “The possible convergence of distributed systems with social innovation could give rise to networks of microenterprise capable of revolutionizing the production system, enhancing the local dimension and redistributing production activities”.
*4. Distributed systems are socio-technical systems in which the adjective distributed denotes that these systems are scattered in many different but connected, relatively autonomous parts, which are mutually linked within wider networks. Chris Ryan, one of the main experts on this topic, defines them in this way: “The distributed model sees infrastructure and critical service systems (for water, food and energy etc.) positioned close to resources and points of demand. Individual sytems may operate as separate, adaptive units but are also linked within ever -wider networks of exchange- at the local, regional or global level. Services traditionally provided by large centralized systems are instead delivered via the collective capacity of many smaller diverse systems. Each is tailored to the needs and opportunities of unique locations but has the capacity to transfer resources across a wider area”.
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John
Thackara
For more than thirty years John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realize a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online and in books, using them in talks for cities and business. He also organizes festivals&events that bring the subjects of these stories together. John studied philosophy, and trained as a journalist, before working for ten years as a book and magazine editor. He is the author of “How To Thrive In The Next Economy”. His previous book was the best-selling “In the Bubble: Designing In A Complex World”. John organizes conferences and festivals in which social innovators share knowledge.
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“We’re filling up the world with technology and devices, but we’ve lost sight of an important question: what is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives”. “Every product that enters our lives has a hidden history – an invisible ‘rucksack’ containing huge quantities of wasted or lost materials used in its production, transport, use and disposal”. Thackara suggests to imagine a world based less on stuff and more on people. It’s not about the schlock of the new(^5), but about radical innovation regaining respect for what people can do that technology can’t, services designed to help people carry out daily activities in
*5. To low quality or value, having cheap or inferior goods or material; trash.
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movement _15
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industrial mass production_ Industrial production was a great achievement that allowed making products available to a large part of the population. With prior artisan manufacturing techniques, these products were accessible just for a few. Over the years, the improvements of techniques and machinery have consolidate the insutrial model and the production of merchandises has far exceeded the demand. CONVENTIONAL ECONOMIC MODEL
*6. Including manufacturing (the Ford factory), secondary socialisation (state schooling), science (scientific method), communication (mass media) and consumption (consumerism).
Modernity is standardisation. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries an overwhelming amount of resources has been spent on the implementation of standardisation in Western countries in the most varied fields(^6). Modernity produced objects and symbols in tandem. At first, these were as equal as could be for all, localised within large-scale manufacturing and consumption systems. Information and goods shared similar origins and destinations, planned as they were for a homogeneous social unit. FICTICIOUS NEEDS: PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE Planned obsolescence is a purposefully implemented strategy that ensures the current version of a given product will become out-of-date or useless within a known time period. This guarantees that consumers will demand replacements in the future, thus naturally supporting demand. In some instances, this can even motivate multiple sales of the same object to the same consumer. History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last - forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption, a whole culture made to break? By choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.
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crisis & paradigm shift_
For many designers, the consequences of this situation have become especially evident with the closing of all kinds of companies, with the disappearance of many clients, with the decimation of designers and design studios and with the annihilation of a treasure trove of experience and knowledge by the speculative shims of the so-called markets. Those same schizophrenic markets now pronounce that the way to reactivation and economic growth is competitiveness and a war of all against all, when what would really be needed would be a real paradigm shift: “a true democracy that is participative and extends to the economic realm; a self-government for every community of the productive processes, of local services, of consumption systems and of the shared enjoyment of common goods�(^8).
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Recently, all of us have lived through the most dramatic and destructive stage of an economic and social crisis that has opened deep wounds in the lives of millions of people, a systematic crisis that has left our future in the hands of people without scruples, the croupiers of the international financial system. It is precisely the financialization of the world economy and its bank-centric logic and totalitarianism that has caused the break of the traditional circularity of the production and consumption processes and produced a deep change of scenario. Manufacturing industry has definitely taken a back seat to a finanzcapitalism(^7) that pursues the accumulation of capital doing all it can to skip the intermediate phase, the production of goods.
*7. Luciano Gallino, Finanzcapitalismo
*8. Guido Viale, VirtĂş che cambiano il mondo
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In the light of the events of recent times companies and professionals in the world of design also need to revise many of the ideas and practices inherited from the past, to break the inertias and continuities of commonly-held discourses and, above all, to generate real alternatives that will be up to the challenges of our time. COLLAVORATIVE ECONOMY: ACCESS CAPITALISM We live in an industrial society but many argue that we are in a cycle change, produced by the Digital Revolution. They consider that the industrial economy is in crisis and that the collaborative one is a model in hatch thanks to Internet. The collavorative economy is allowing to live again the largest set of economic, technological and social transformations in the history of mankind since the Industrial Revolution; it is taking the step from an urban, industrialized and mechanized economy to an economy of a sustainable, human and aware nature; it is generating local economic microstructures with strong impact on peer communities, spreading patterns of local consumption; the economic market system works without intermediaries; the processors facilitate contact between producers and consumers and can not intervene in supply or demand; the market is composed of citizens who consider themselves peers; in short, it represents access capitalism. DISTRIBUTED ECONOMY
*9. Biggs,C., Ryan, C. and Wisman, J. (2010): “Distributed systems. A design model for sustainable and resilient infrastructure�
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In the past decade, the diffusion of the Internet, mobile phones and social media, converging with social innovation, has enabled the creation of a new generation of services that not only offer unprecedented solutions to difficult social problems but also challenge our ideas of welfare and the relationship between the citizen and the state. Today, parallel to this great convergence, a second is in the making. The explosive technological innovation underway in the field of fabrication systems, with the miniaturization of productive units offers the possibility of creating new production and consumption networks: distributed systems (^9). The possible convergence of distributed systems with social innovation could give rise to networks of microenterprises capable of revolutionizing the production system. enhancing the local dimension and redistributing production activities and job opportunities in the opposite direction to what has been dominant in past decades.
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an emerging civilization: design for social innovation_ Nowadays, our activities are carried out differently from how they used to be done a few years ago, and designers have been the first to understand the new rules of the game, to reinvent themselves as professionals in order to invest in their personal projects and to make their own way. That is how countless small manufacturers have arisen in recent years, led by designers who are searching for a new way to design and market their products. THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
*10. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) economy is a decentralized model whereby two individuals interact to buy or sell goods and services directly with each other, without intermediation by a third-party, or without the use of a company of business.
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The different decentralized alternatives to traditional industrial and large-scale manufacturing seem destined to radically change our environment and the way we work, learn and even live. Theorists of the stature of Yochai Benkler, Jeremy Rifkin or Michel Bauwens, amongst many others, do not hesitate in defining our current status as the lead-up to a third industrial revolution, driven by astounding technological innovations. And it is precisely these innovations, which currently allow for so much distributed, collaborative and P2P(^10) manufacturing, such as the use of everimproving digital manufacturing tools and economies that facilitate even home manufacturing methods. The example of RepRap 3-D printers is emblematic in this sense as they are in fact free self-replication machines that anybody can produce for themselves, and whose continuous evolution is guaranteed through a large community of networked users. There are emerging selfproduction stories that are less linked to technological innovation, at least as refers to the triggers for certain types of creative activism or its presence in public places. These are responeses from below to the social disasters caused by the recent economic and systemic crisis.
DIY, DIWO AND MAKERS. HORIZONTAL STRUCTURE
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The figure of the modern self-producer is increasingly accompanied by the rapid democratisation of design and production technology. Self-production includes an heterogeneous collection of processes for different purposes that basically share a common characteristic: they are used to produce or manufacture single items or micro-series using a limited range of technology and human and financial resources. Throughout the last few decades, the spread of DIY has become ever more important and its practices have spread from the context of the counter-cultures. Thanks to digital technologies, to phenomena such as social networks, to the maker movement and to the new tools of digital design and manufacture, DIY has become an all-pervading logic, a way of material and cultural selforganization that favors the construction of new spaces of autonomy. Currently, citizens are putting into practice new forms of direct and shared action, of self-management and empowerment, which, beyond protest, constitute the starting point for deep social innovation and transformation. Consumer groups and new food production and distribution networks, urban communitymanaged food gardens, time banks or new practices of energy self-sufficiency and social economy are examples of what is known as DIWO (Do-It-With-Others), and through them new local developments have been built and self-produced that give back to the people and their communities their relevance and ability to be selfsufficient. But is this really the end of a society based on vertical industrial production, mass consumption and goods desired by all as we know it? Apart from the possible answers to this question it should be noted that the democratization of production methods is just a matter of time and that Fab Lab networks, makerspace and hackerspace already exist throughout the world, along with micro-factories, self-producers and millions of people who live and share this new existance on a daily basis, who multiply experiences and networked models of action, who create alternatives for each place that are respectful towards resources and local cultural traditions. they are people that take on the responsibility of participating in change, a change that we all want and that is a little closer to us every day.
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COLLAVORATIVE PLATFORMS 1. Make Works - Scotland “We realised that if we made it easier to find and understand local manufacturers, people would start to make work with them”. Make Works is an open access directory of fabricators, material suppliers, workshops and manufacturers. It is free to use, and free to be listed. 2. Enspiral - Holanda. Enspiral is a virtual and physical network of companies and professionals brought together by a set of shared values and a passion for positive social impact. It’s sort of a “DIY” social enterprise support network. At its heart, it’s a group of people who want to co-create an encouraging, diverse community of people trying to make a difference. 3. EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) is a programme of activities founded by the European Commission, the aim of which is to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability. To this end it seeks to shed more light on cases where subjects and communities use existing resources in an original way to bring about system innovation. 4. The Young Foundation - UK Putting people at the heart of social change. The Young Foundation has devoted itself to fighting inequality through trailblazing research and by working with communities. Their ethos of ‘doing with’ people – rather than people ‘being done to’ – is vital. 5. Masters of Barcelona - Barcelona Discover the professions and workshops remaining in Barcelona to understand and document the figureof the artisans and the role that craftwork plays nowadays. 6. Desis Network - Worldwide DESIS is a no-profit and cultural association, with the purpose to promote design for social innovation in higher education institutions with design discipline so as to generate useful design knowledge and to create meaningful social changes in collaboration with other stakeholders. 22_
challenges_ artifact
Self-production is a complex phenomenon in terms of functional solutions aesthetical design and finished quality. Many self-produced creations are imperfect; they may be inefficient and may malfucntion, even if they could appear to look the same as their industrial or artisan counterparts. This aspect is part of their prototypeproduct hybrid nature. In many cases, this does not seem to be a problem for an emerging self-production market in which value is often not exclusively connected to the value of the object itself but to the economic and social value of the process that generated it and the experience acquired during this process. A world is thus emerging that oscillates between selfproductoin and an increasing organised collection of self-production solutions (tools, means, etc.). A global generation of self-producers is designing a new model that can be defined both in terms of indie innovation and reverse innovation that can invert and subvert the logic, dynamics, generation flows transference and adoption of innovation. In real terms, self-production is evolving as reference model to enable and test invention-innovation processes conceived from and with multi-disciplinary design skills, materialised through technological experimentation and finally validated through the social network. A large part of self-production during this economic crisis has taught us that waste materials are not just things to throw away but materials which are there to be more than recycled, reused.
REFERENCES ENSPIRAL_ https://medium.com/enspiral-tales / https://enspiral.com/ EMUDE_ http://www.sustainable-everyday-project.net/emude/ THE YOUNG FOUNDATION_ https://youngfoundation.org/ MAKE WORKS_ https://make.works/ MASTERS OF BARCELONA_ http://entresuelo1a.wixsite.com/masterofbarcelona DESIS NETWORK_ http://www.desisnetwork.org/ +++ many others _23
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manifesto_ how many beer taps will be manufactured today? and how many of those will need to be repaired or replaced? we do not want to mass produce another beer tap, even more when we can actually build it from existing objects_ the aim of the project is to design an accessible, open-source, doit-yourself, upcycled and mass produced beer tap_
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Ideation of first concepts by using collage.
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thus, we want to design an open-source do-it-yourself beer tap in order to transform an expensive and high maintenance object into a simple one, so that it can be accessible to everyone_ jĂşlia & jĂşlia
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_almost every functional artifact can be reduced to 28_
artifact
ARTIFACT / ˈ ɑ ː t ɪ f a k t / noun noun: artefact 1. an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest. “gold and silver artefacts” 2. something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure. “the curvature of the surface is an artefact of the wide-angle view”
actions_ _29
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artifact_ Based on the research of emergent movements born as alternatives to a mass industrial production in crisis, we came to a significative conclusion: that a lot of objects could be defined with actions and, therefore, simplifed for the makers to be produced by themselves easily. In the case of this project, a beer tap reduced to actions. These actions that nowadays describe the beer taps and many other objects, in the past were designed by industries with complicated solutions that were not accessible for the population to be selfproduced. With Artifact, we have tried to start from zero, to rethink at a very low stage the design of an object. That is to say, to question each element and its uselessness, trying to minimalize though the complicated elements. We want the user and maker to explore without having a preconceived idea of how the final object will look like. Therefore, we came to the idea that by giving them actions instead of objects or structures, they would gain the needed knowledge to build their own artifact. Moreover, they would have to experiment with the objects they have around, as we will give them a theoretical concept instead of a finished design. Appart from a beer tap, the artifact movement aims to have more objects reduced to actions. For example, it could be a hair dryer (A-HD), a coffee machine (A-CM) or a photography camera (A-PC) reanalysed, simplified and reduced to actions.
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artifact Some initial sketches.
Artifact’s concept hierarchy and nomenclature.
A ARTIFACT MOVEMENT
A-BT BEER TAP ARTIFACT
A-BT001 OUR BEER TAP MODEL
A ARTIFACT is another way of producing; an answer to an emergent culture of makers; an alternative movement to the mass production model that has become unsustainable for future scenarios. A-BT ARTIFACT-BEERTAP. Artifact is thought to replace quotidian objects whose main function can be solved easily with materials and other objects all of us have around. One of these objects is a beer tap. A-BT001 This is our beer tap; the one that we have achieved following the basic actions, with the material we have had around these days. If we did it again time after, we would have other material and BT002 would look different. _31
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conventional beer tap_ A beer tap is an industrial matter. Almost all beer taps have this same structure and these elements, where beer goes through and is served from the barrel to the glass.
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1_ CO2 cylinder. It makes the needed preassure. 2_ preassure valve. It regulates the gas preassure. 3_ connector tubes. It joins all the system. 4_ beer barrel. Contains the beer. 5_ cooling system. It allows having the beer cold. 6_ beer tap case structure. 7_ on/off tap. It regulates the flow of beer.
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elemental beer tap_ However, a beer tap can be simplified much more; we need to take a look to its function and understand the purpose for which it has been designed. So,
why do we need a beer tap? what does a beer tap do?
A beer tap is a tool for people to serve beer from a big container (1) to a little one (3), from the barrel to the glass. And the beer tap (2) is the tool inbetween the beginning and the end. We understand this project as an opportunity to rethink actual objects. Thus, can we elude the industrial elements the conventional objects have by applying smart mechanical solutions alternative to the actual ones? This new definition of a beer tap lets us imagine a lot of possiblitiles while designing an object from zero able to serve beer. _35
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Daniel
Bernoulli
Daniel Bernoulli (Feb 1700 – Mar 1782) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli Brothers. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics.
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1. Bernoulli line. While the end of the tube (C) is lower than its beginning (A) and the liquid inside the tube gets over the maximum (B), the fluid flows continously by gravity. This happens because, the liquid tends to level both tube's ends (A and C).
siphon principle All known published theories in modern times recognize Bernoulli’s equation as a decent approximation to idealized, friction-free siphon operation. The siphon is based on a tube in an inverted 'U' shape, which causes a liquid to flow upward, above the surface of a reservoir, with no pump, but powered by the fall of the liquid as it flows down the tube under the pull of gravity, then discharging at a level lower than the surface of the reservoir from which it came. We can take this phenomenon as the base of A-BT. By applying the siphon principle, the new BT won't need the CO2 cylinder and the preassure valve which are far from being accessible for most of common pepole, as we are designing for them. _37
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"almost every functional artifact can be reduced to actions" actions A-BT_ The Artifact movement is born with the subject Projects II and the briefing for a beer tap. That is why the first artifact to be deconstructed in the A movement is a beer tap (BT from now on). After analysing conventional beer taps, we have concluded the basic actions so as to build an accessible do-it-yourself and with-others BT. In order to truly make it feasable to build it “at home� and really do it functional, that is to say, capable of serving beer from a big container to a little one (the glass), we have removed the industrial elements and non-accessible for the major part of the population, such as the CO2 cylinder and the preassure valves. We rethought at a very low stage the beer tap, deconstructing the idea of a conventional industrial one and redefining the basic structure. Based on the definition of an elemental BT and applying elemental physic laws (siphon principle), we have stated the basic actions for the BT to work. These are the followings, which can be reordered as needed:
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01_ grab 02_ elevate 03_ secure 04_ draw 05_ tube 06_ cool 07_ standby 08_ prime 09_ serve
01_ Grab the beer container to secure it. You can skip this action if your plan is to elevate it only with your hands. 02_ Elevate. Lift the beer container at least 40cm from the floor. 03_ Secure the beer container in it’s new height. 04_ Draw a horizontal line on the bottom of the beer container and extend it until you reach the place you want to serve the beer. 05_ Tube. Insert one end of the tube into the beer container. It needs to be always on the bottom of it, so fix it if it’s necessary. 06_ Cool. Get the beer through a cooling area. The cooling area can be either around the recipient or a path of the tube. 07_ Standby. Place the serving spot. To make the beer flow, you will need to place the other end of the tube on the area below the horizontal line. 08_ Prime. Pump the end of the tube so that the beer starts flowing. 09_ Serve the beer and enjoy!
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A-BT decalaogue
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BT001
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A-BT001 This is ours. This is the 001 beer tap: the A-BT001. Every artifact is highly influenced by its context, not only by its function but also by the materials used so as to build it. The result is closer to a piece made by an artisan than it is to an object industrially produced: as the artisan will probably work with the raw material that the place where he or she works naturally produces, we will work with the objects that people around us use and get rid of. We created this beer tap in the mediterranean and multicultural city of Barcelona, where once a week in each neighborhood, people leave the furniture they want to get rid of outside of their houses. On the same day, at night, a truck passes through the streets, picks all this furniture up and takes it to the waste point. To create the artifact A-BT001, we collected all the materials we needed in the Gracia neighborhood. Aesthetically, it’s influenced by what we see around us. Barcelona it’s a historical and crowded city that constantly changes, so it’s citizens are used to hear and see public and private spaces being built or rebuilt. When designing the beer tap, we, as citizens, were influenced by the building materials (such as building platforms or ladders) that are used all around the city. So that is why our beer tap looks as it does, and that’s also why probably, if this beer tap was built by someone else and some other time, it would be completely different. And that’s the beauty of the movement.
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A-BT001 has been inspired by the street works, a reality still under construction and in a constant state of flux. It takes both the under-construction aesthetics and some elemenets these structures have, such as pulleys, stairs, hanging elements, ropes, fixing tools, flanges, ephemeral unions, levels structure... Our BT has copied some of these solutions so as to make the Bernoulli's principle feasible and be able to substitute the conventional solutions for the actual BTs.
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A-BT works because of the siphon principle, which states that simply by having the liquid in a highest position than the end of the tube, the liquid will flow continously. The basic A-BT simply needs the beer barrel to be on a high surface, such as this chair with a tube for the serving.
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A-BT001 aims to ideate a simple structure but enough strong to bear the heavy elements such as the beer barrel. Following the A-BT decalogue, we imagined this structure, which will be the guideline for the following collection of material. In order to elevate the barrel, we have thought about implementing a pulleys system, just like the street works ones, that easy readuce the weight to a half or more. For the cooling system, a portable fridge with ice. For the connections, metal angles or others, depending on the material we find. The Artifact movement wants to democratize the rubbish and rethink its management. There should be levels of rubbish distributed by their further usage in order to upcycle it, having a better sense of sustainability. _49
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BCN street furniture_ *11. For deeper information of the service: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/ ecologiaurbana/ca/serveis/la-ciutatfunciona/manteniment-de-l-espai-public/ gestio-de-neteja-i-residus/recollida-deresidus-domiciliaris
The city council of Barcelona offers a service for the collection of old furniture and equipment that people do not need and want to get rid of (^11). Once a week, according to each neighborhood, they can leave the stuff on the street from 20-22h. Then, a truck picks up everything that citizens have left behind and takes it to the different recycling points, depending on the material in question. We went out with a pink shopping cart and collected everything we considered useful for our BT. We found a lot of stuff, some of it in very good condition and you can see that people takes care about leaving their furniture well placed on the street in case people can give them back to life for further usage. During the two days of collecting material we saw some people collecting stuff from the street, but not much. This movement is still not seen as normal, and it is a challenge for all of us to normalize this action of collecting from the street so as to reuse material and objects that have lost its function and usage for someone, but still can work for others. And really, the street hides treasures!
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Barcelona streets one random tuesday with plenty of leftovers neighbours wanted to get rid of. Gracia neighbourhood.
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General measures: 60 x 50 x 200 mm
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02_ Flat surfaces: we found the white one on the steet among many other furniture (^13). The brown surface was in Elisava's workshop under the table as useless material. 03_ Green strips: every morning Júlia goes to work by Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat and she always passes by a big work street rubbish container (^14) full of interesting material. One day she saw this green strip. 04_ Screws, corner braces: we found some of the screws inside a plastic box in the workshop of our university (^15), that has plenty of used material that students can use to build a product. They are all self-countersunk wood screws, between M3’5-M5 and 30mm-50mm long. We believe that they mostly came from wooden furniture. 05_ Pulley: when she went back to her hometown (^16), Júlia found a brand new pulley when she was looking for stuff in her garage. We will use it to lift the big container.
*12. See BCN map 01 in the next section.
artifact
01_ Wooden structure: we found the wood for the structure in an intersection (^12) in Gracia Neighborhood. It came from an old single Ikea Tarva bed, built with untreated Pine wood (which was in very good condition).
*13. See BCN map 02.
*14. See BCN map 03.
*15. See BCN map 04.
*16. See BCN map 05.
06_ Rope: when she was in her first year of uni, Julia designed a lamp and hanged it with natural twisted rope. She bought more rope than she needed, so we decided to use this rope to lift the beer container. 07_ Hinges: we found both hinges in the same plastic box we found the screws in. They probably came from old wooden doors. 08_ Cooling container: Julia's friend is moving to Germany and has a lot of material to get rid of. The blue bucket was among all the stuff she wanted to get rid of.
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*17. See BCN map A.
A_ Plastic tube: we decided to buy the plastic tube for hygiene matters, as the beer passes through it. We bought it at Ferreteria Avinyó (^17), a hardware store near our university. The tube is made from transparent PVC, it’s 5m long and 7mm intern diameter. B_ Bottle: we decided to use a 5L water bottle as our beer container. As in Barcelona the tap water is not that good and Júlia had had a stomachache some weeks ago, she bought a 5L water bottle in the supermarket. We re-used the bottle and made it our beer container! _53
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JĂşlia went around her flat in Gracia neighbourhood with her pink shopping cart to collect Artifact's material. These are the wooden bars for the basic structure.
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St. Joan Stop, S6 train Sabadell direction.
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BCN map with the locations where we have found the material to build A-BT001.
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Tarragona, C/Mozart _55
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A-BT001 56_
details_ artifact
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This pulley system reduces to a half the weight of the big container that needs to be in a higher position than the end's tube.
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artifact A-BT001 cooling system is as easy as several tube circles into ice.
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A plastic mayonnaise bottle makes the pumping of the Siphon's principle.
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The unions are part important of Artifact's BT structure. In this case, as we mainly found wood, we are using wood type screws for the strong unions. For the fixing parts, we used hinges which are strong enough for their porpouse.
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artifact
the experience To film how A-BT001 works, we decided that we should do it in its natural habitat: the street. Therefore, we took it to Plaรงa dels ร ngels (populary known as plaรงa del macba), a square in the Raval neighborhood, where the museum of modern art is located. When we were filming the performance, people went by and stayed a bit watching how it works, as it is a very unconventional artifact for a very rather conventional use. This made us think in weather, without even knowing it, we had designed something that could be used to give the action of serving beer this artsy performative character.
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new scenarios What if we created a place where everyone could share and learn from other artifacts made by different people around the world? As we stated earlier, we believe that decoding an object by it’s actions rather than by it’s function frees some the pre-concieved ideas we have of how the final object will look like. Therefore, it helps us design by doing, always experimenting with the things we have around us. Our aim is to create a movement that merges the opendata technology with the ecology of re-used materials without constraining the artist/designer.
http://artifact.org
almost every funtional artifact can be reduced to actions_ + info
Artifact: Location: Makers: 66_
A-BT001 Barcelona Júlia & Júlia
So, what do our A-BT001 and the future A-BT002 will have in common? Formally, maybe nothing; however, the actions the user will need to do to use the artifact and it’s function will be almost the same. artifact
To achieve this, we will create an online platform where everyone will be able to search for a product, see the actions needed to develop it and check out all the different artifacts made from it. So, for instance, if someone makes a BT from the actions we developed, when he or she uploads the result to the platform, his or her artifact’s name will be A-BT002; but, if someone creates a set of actions to make a chair, his/her artifact’s name will be A-CH001. Hopefully, in a future, the movement will grow and we will create a network of people that want to self-produce their enviroment by re-using the stuff they have around.
ACTIONS A-BT
A-BT001
Grab Elevate Secure Tube Cool Standby Serve
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A-BT001 projectsII
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= Artifact
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artifact
Yochai Benkler + Ezio Manzini + John Thackara + Amory Lovins + Paul Hawken + Hunter Lovins + Natural Capitalism + Luciano Gallino + Finanzcapitalismo + Guido Viale + Pierluigi Cattermole + Experimenta 66 + Chris Ryan + Robin Murray + Nesta + DESIS + Marcelo Leslabay + Pierluigi Cattermole + Ernesto Oroza + Marcus Kayser + Dirk Vander Kooij + Wind Knitting Factory + Mischer’traxler + Collective Works + Paolo Deganello + Enzo Mari + Zuloark + Pez Estudio + Bertram Maria Niessen + Alfred Schßtz + Thomas Luckmann + Peter Berger + Harold Garfinkel + RepRap + Arduino + Fab Foundation + Thingiverse + Michel Bauwens + Jeremy Rifkin + Charles Leadbeater + Marcin Jakubowski + ... + many others
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chin-chin!
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Júlia Carrasco Júlia Claveria Mentored by Robert Thomson 4th GEDI - Projects II ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering