(re)natured part 1
(re)natured part 1
June 2020 Berlin Central Saint Martins BA Graphic Communication Design Text: Leila Wallisser Design: Leila Wallisser Print: Solid Earth Binding: Leila Wallisser Typefaces: Huerto Grotesk Aktiv Grotesk Founders Grotesk Paper: Recycled 110 g/m2
(re)natured part 1
leila wallisser
decay, dissolve, design
section 1 / decay
6
“Humans are competent to do many things. But I do not think we are competent to run a global ecosystem. Something has been irretrievably lost by the time we begin to believe that we can manage nature for people. The essence of nature is that it is not “for people.�
Verlyn Klinkenborg / 2007
(re)natured
content
introduction
10
1/3 decay
14
is there beauty in decay?
2/3 dissolve
62
do things really disappear?
3/3 design
96
is there value in discarded recources?
epilogue
156
bibliography
160
section 1 / decay
introduction 10
Are we loosing touch with nature? Over the course of history, our relationship to the Earth has radically changed. Between ancient beliefs and modern politics, nature has become an abstract concept that combines the idea of an unforgiving and uncontrollable wilderness with the sentiment of a nurturing, harmonious ideal. On top of this, we have reached a stage where the human impact on the planet is not only becoming noticeably evident, but irreversible. Our traces are everywhere, untouched nature is a scarcity. Born and made are becoming indistinguishable, leaving that which we previously perceived to be natural to be now made by humans. This publication is an investigation into our morphed relationship to nature. Inspired by the book Cradle to Cradle, in which the chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough explore how to mimic nature’s model of a sustainable production system, it is an inquiry into the life cycle of an object. Particularly fascinated by this idea of after, it focusses on the importance of the final stage as a deciding factor for the revival of the next. The investigation is divided into three distinct categories: decay, dissolve and design. The first is a study into the nature, characteristics and aesthetics of decay. It is an exploration into the last stage of an objects life cycle, aiming to capture it just before it disappears. Dissolve focusses on the process of disintegration and the durability of waste. It is an investigation into the life-span of certain man-made materials in comparison to natural life. The final category design, focusses on integrating natural aesthetics back into man-made materials, adding narrative to by-products of our current eco-system.
Is there beauty in decay? The following pages are an exploration into the last stage of an objects life. Ranging from the rust on metal to natural elements such as bark and leaves, this visual investigation aims to capture the final stage of an object just before it disappears.
decay dissolve design 1/3
section 1 / decay
16
“In nature nothing can be lost, nothing wasted, nothing thrown away, there is no such thing as rubbish.�
John Stewart Collis / 1947
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“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
Alice Walker / 2016
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52.889590 13.480862
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51 52.889590 13.480862
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“Decay is renewal – a perhaps contradictory sentence that nevertheless characterises the aesthetically sustainable product, which ages gracefully and which possesses the germ of aesthetic decay as process. Decay equals renewal in the sense that aesthetic decay ensures the continued interest and fascination of the recipient.�
Kristine Harper / 2018
When do things dissolve? Where do things disappear to? Do they really disappear? The following pages are an investigation into the durability of waste and questions the sustainability of our current production-system.
dissolve design
decay
2/3
section 2 / dissolve
64
“But where is ‘away’? Of course ‘away’ doesn’t really exist. ‘Away’ has gone away.”
William McDonough / 2002
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66
on designing time
section 2 / dissolve
Ed van Hinte Experimental Eco-Design / 2009
69
“Going to Mars doesn’t really get you anywhere. However, it takes a huge effort, in terms of time, money and danger, and for some reason we humans seem to like that. We’re always so damn industrious. In fact we all seem to suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and the results are usually questionable, to put it mildly. We try to recreate ourselves in God’s image, but end up being a bunch of clumsy troublemakers. The wisdom that a better option might be to do nothing has almost completely evaporated from our minds, even although it is the tacit idea behind all technological developments: free us from productive activities to idly enjoy the blessings of full-blown automation. It is absolutely weird that, instead, designers and engineers are constantly busy, deadline after deadline, developing things, commodities, that areeither meant for saving time, like airplanes, washing machines and robots, or for wasting time, like weapons, video games and even more robots. Cars provide us with speed, convenience and comfort, while training bikes make us sweat to stay fit, but without benefit of moving from one place to another. They are the uppers and downers of our lives, not necessarily in any specific order. My father was a psychiatrist in a hospital. Whenever he took in a new patient for his ward, the first thing he did was stop all medicine, sometimes as much as an ounce of pills. More often than not the patient’s condition immediately improved because of that. Maybe that is what we ought to do: stop creating all these silly life-improving gizmos, at least for a while, just to see what happens.”
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70
on plastic
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Koert van Mensvoort Next Nature / 2011
73
“Plastic is our poisonous gift to the planet. We took the oil out of the ground, transformed it into plastic and brought it to the oceans. Ironically, like plastic today, oil too was once waste, created by the remains of vegetation that died millions of years ago, sunk in the sediments and due to the long-term geological pressure was transformed into oil where it remained until people discovered it was of use to them and started pumping it up. Who knows, in due time, some other organism or intelligence will appreciate plastic as a valuable material and mine or feed on it, like we have done with oil. But how many sea creatures will have to perish before this happens? The only sensible way to think of plastic nowadays is to consider it as a raw material within the ecosystem of the earth. The apparent problem is that there is no species, process or actor that can feed on it: it is a next nature material, with its balancing counterpart yet to evolve. Perhaps some future-evolving microbe, able to digest plastic, could thrive on the vast amount of plastic ‘food’ available in the ecosystem. It might take a million years, however, for such a plastic eating microbe to evolve. Yet, it would certainly have enough food to proliferate.”
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on the anthropocene
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Jan Zalasieqicz Radical Matter / 2018
81
“The term Anthropocene refers to the relatively recent time period when human activities such as mining, agriculture and urbanisation have physically altered the Earth’s structure and cycles. The evidence for the Anthropocene can be put into three very large buckets: physical, chemical and biological. Until about 1750 such changes were very slow. They accelerated rapidly in the post-war boom of the mid-20th century. In the early 1950s, layers of geological strata round the world were sprinkled with detectable amounts of plutonium and caesium from nuclear tests. This was not the beginning of the Anthropocene, but it’s a useful marker. The key thing about the Anthropocene is its trajectory. The former stable background is now changing its character very rapidly – and this has taken place in the space of one human lifetime. Humans are altering the geological make-up of the planet. A lot of human impacts are negative, or storing up trouble. Some changes, though aren’t necessarily in that category. For instance, we are very good at reshaping chemical compounds into new forms. They are getting on for 5,000 natural minerals. Humans came in and started making what are, in effect, minerals; these number around 187,000 and climbing, a dramatic increase in mineralogical diversity. Some of these new materials might become key in the Anthropocene conditions of the future.
Plastiglomerates are a good example of humans and natural processes combining, but they are a microscopic part of the changes taking place. The really big resources of the future are thousands of metres deep. They contain metals, plastics, human-made and organic material in the most incredible mixtures, mixtures not at all present anywhere in the natural world. Physically, chemically and biologically we are creating something quite alien to the Earth. You might also wonder what you can do with the subsoil beneath the city. The mashed-up remains of former buildings, mixed up with soil, can forma a layer tens of metres thick. There is also the stuff dumped as waste by metal and coal mines: billions of tons of stuff that is a potential resource. The next 50 years will be critical. We need to decarbonise industry pretty quickly. The effectiveness and cost of renewables such as solar is getting better all the time. I have colleagues working on ways to extract metals without some of the damaging consequences of big holes in the ground. The question is how quickly we will adapt. The techno sphere refers to the way that human-built structures and technology are becoming a new system, rather like the biosphere. A whole lot of people are pushing and pulling, but no one is in charge, and it is evolving by natural selection. For example, mobile phones suddenly spread and became a huge influence. No one could have predicted that until mobiles arrived, and we can’t predict what will come next.
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There’s clearly a space for new thinking in design. Our present course is not sustainable. The way we use huge amounts of energy, the way we use materials: one way or another there will have to be modification. Development and sustainability is partly material conception and partly societal. A whole lot of people will have to talk to each other in realistic ways.
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There is a bumpy path ahead but some aspects offer hope. We now have a better picture of the unintended consequences of our success over the past centuries. We can use that knowledge to develop new materials that might help. Humans are ingenious creatures – and our practical ingenuity will certainly be needed.�
section 2 / dissolve
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This whole idea of throwing things ‘away’ – ‘away’ doesn’t exist. An item that falls out of cycles of use doesn’t go ‘away’; it renders the place where it ends up unusable – a landfill site, a river that stops fulfilling its function. There is no such thing as throwing ‘away’.
Julia Lohmann / 2018
on value
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Julia Lohmann Radical Matter / 2018
89
“One of the biggest ailments of our society is that we’ve become blind to the value of the material we surround ourselves with. Look at anything around you, a plastic bag for example, and think of what went into bringing it to you: millions of years of sedimentation transformed into plastic, into something we use for five minutes. I find it very sobering. Craftsmen are acutely aware of that value, of the natural history of their materials. The voice of the material coming through in the object is often very much appreciated inc craft – and, while it is valued in craft techniques, it is almost impossible to achieve in industrial production and mass manufacture. This whole idea of throwing things ‘away’ – ‘away’ doesn’t exist. An item that falls out of cycles of use doesn’t go ‘away’; it renders the place where it ends up unusable – a landfill site, a river that stops fulfilling its function. There is no such thing as throwing ‘away’. As a designer, you are an amplifier, so you have a much bigger impact than a single consumer. Consumer choices have an impact, but a designer amplifies, whether they make many pieces or just one for a particular show. As a designer, you have a moral obligation to consider the impact of what you are doing.”
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How can we add value to discarded resources? The final investigation is an example of how to ad narrative to byproducts of our current ecosystem. With a focus on integrating natural aesthetics back into man-made materials, the nine new materials take inspiration from visual aspects of wood, marble and stone. It pictures a scenario of future mining, in which resources that we so easily discard such as plastic, gain a new purpose.
design
decay dissolve
3/3
section 3 / design
98
“Human design has made nature more natural than natural: it is now hyper-natural. It is a simulation of a nature that never existed. It’s better than the real thing; hyper-natural nature is always just a little bit prettier, slicker and safer than the old kind.�
Koert van Mensvoort / 2011
carbon copy
100
section 3 / design
a collection of hypernatural materials
4 / rainforest green 5 / everlasting white 6 / ocean black
7 / foam white 8 / petroleum black 9 / monolithic grey
timber
3 / smokey bamboo
marble
2 / soft walnut
terazzo
1 / spinning ebony
1 / spinning ebony
made from: bike tyre origin: found on a walk through the woods substance: synthetic rubber key features: petroleum byproduct, air and water pollutant
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timber
105
2 / soft walnut
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timber made from: carpet origin: found on the street substance: synthetic fibres
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key features: petroleum byproduct, non-biodegradable
3 / smokey bamboo
made from: tobacco packets origin: collected substance: low density polyethelene (LDPE) key features: non-biodegradable, photodegrading, toxic pollutant
110
timber
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114
“Landfill sites are incredible places where objects disappear into the ground in the hope of disposing of them but these sites will become increasingly valuable as a mine for materials and a resource in the future.�
Zoe Laughlin / 2018
on material
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Anders Lendager Radical Matter / 2018
117
“Today’s waste can be made as desirable as the virgin materials of the past. For architects and designers, the chance of creating something beautiful from something that looks ugly and was designed badly is much greater than if they take something like a piece of 400-yearold oak and try to add beauty to it. We have done it with up-cycled concrete. The used concrete makes the new concrete more beautiful. We sand it down and you see the old concrete as a lighter colour within the new concrete, like the rings in a tree. It becomes a kind of terrazzo concrete that it very beautiful, also because of the narrative that it is reused is embedded in the material for everyone to see. What we are looking for in sustainability is always this added value. It doesn’t have to mean more investment. It has to be a layered story about why this material is more valuable. If we can do that, then we succeed in making a difference.”
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4 / rainforest green
marble made from: morrisons plastic bag origin: bought at the counter substance: medium density polyethelene (MDPE) key feautures: requires high amounts of fossil fuels, photodegrading, toxic pollutant
5 / ocean black
made from: food packaging origin: chocolate wrapper substance: polypropylene (PP) key features: non-biodegradable, photodegrading, toxic pollutant
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marble
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6 / everlasting white
marble made from: plastic bag origin: received at corner shop substance: high density polyethylene (HDPE) key features: non-recyclable, photodegrading, air and water pollutant
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“We are plunging, headlong, into an epoch of global environmental change at an unpredictable scale and pace. How we learn to live with that change is the central challenge for the next half-century of design.”
Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey / 2019
natural laws
section 3 / design
Edwin Datschefski Experimental Eco Design / 2009
135
“If we learn from nature and change the quality of the energy and material we use, then we can move closer to being fully sustainable. For example, if we use solar energy, there may be no environmental impact at all, so we could use as much as we like or could afford. Another important idea is that the flows of materials in nature tend to be cyclic, so you can never run out of resources. By recycling more minerals we can mimic nature. And obviously, using materials that have been grown is also a good thing – there are now some very high-performance plastics made from corn as well as wood and soya biocomposites to choose from. It is very achievable to undertake design for mass production that follows the basic protocols followed by nature systems. The five design requirements of sustainable products are that they be: cyclic, solar, safe, efficient, and socially responsible. The first three mimic the protocols followed by plant and animal ecosystems.
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1) Cyclic The product is made from compatible organic materials or from minerals that are continuously recycled in a closed loop. This can be achieved by making use of recycled metal, glass, and plastic, and by creating products that are more recyclable. […] Cyclic products can also make use of grown materials such as wood, leather, wool, or one of the new bioplastic materials made from corn and potato starch.
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2) Solar The product, in manufacture and use, consumes only renewable energy that is cyclic and safe. This includes wind, small-scale hydro and solar energy – there has been a boom in solar panel manufacturing recently. Some factories are run using these various forms of renewable energy. In many cases, the bulk of energy used during a product’s lifetime is expended during its manufacture.
3) Safe All releases to air, water and land provide food for other systems. Every manufacturing process is considered and its negative impacts reduced or avoided entirely. […] 4) Efficient This requirement is based on the need to maximise the utility of resources in a finite world. The product in manufacture and use requires 90-percent fewer materials and 90-percent less energy and water than products providing equivalent utility did in 1990. Using less is always a good idea. […] 5) Socially Responsible All companies have an impact on the people who work for them and the communities within which they operate. […] The manufacture and use of sustainable products should support basic human rights and natural justice. This means ensuring decent working conditions and fair play, ideally with a social “premium” to be used by the producers to improve their living and working conditions.”
7 / monolithic grey
made from: styrofoam origin: found on a walk through the woods substance: extruded polyesterine foam (EPS) key features: air pollutant, impacts health
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terazzo
141
8 / petroleum black
made from: bike tyres origin: found on a walk through the woods substance: synthetic rubber key features: petroleum byproduct, air and water pollutant
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terazzo
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9 / foaming white
terazzo made from: styrofoam origin: found on a walk through the woods substance: extruded polyesterine foam (EPS) key features: air pollutant, impacts health
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152
“The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. “
Theodore Roosevelt / 1910
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epilogue 156
Design is a form of improvement. Choosing to use this toolkit comes with the responsibility to use it well. I often ask myself the question: Is “good” design something that has fulfilled a moral purpose or something that has made an aesthetic contribution? And have answered it: It should be both. By taking on the role as active curator, I believe there is a certain moral compulsion to use design thinking for the benefit of society. I don’t believe this to have be constrained to classical problem solving – as most problems do not have one simple solution. Similarly, as expressed by the architect Peter Buchanan (2005): “There’s no single, exclusive route to sustainability.” As an individual and a collective, we all have our part to play in this fight against the climate crisis, and we are running out of time. I see it as my responsibility to use the resources I have learnt – in my case the tools of visual communication – in an attempt to make a change. Design goes beyond a slick product or a commercial advert, it has the capability to benefit all, to inspire people to ‘go green’ by making that option more attractive than its toxic counterpart. There needs to be a radical change in our mindset towards the only Earth we have. Recycling is no longer enough, we need to redefine need, and reset our values. We need to design towards a sustainable future.
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“Let’s stop fighting over who we believe created the planet, and work together against those that choose to destroy it.”
Jack Barker / 2016
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bibliography 160
Brower, C., Mallory, R. and Ohlman, Z., 2009. Experimental Eco-Design. RotoVision. Van Mensvoort, K. and Grievink, H.J. eds., 2011. Next Nature. Actar. Franklin, K. and Till, C., 2018. Radical matter: rethinking materials for a sustainable future. Thames & Hudson Incorporated.
McDonough, W. and Braungart, M., 2010. Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things. North point press. Siegle, L.2006, Recycle. The essential guide. Black Dog Publishing Limited.
p. 69 p. 137-139 p. 73
p. 89 p. 81-83
What exactly do we define as nature? How has our relationship to nature changed? And what are the consequences of this?
leila wallisser
An investigation into our morphed relationship to nature. Divided into the sections decay, dissolve and design, this book explores the life-cycle of both natural and un-natural objects.