The process of production often goes together with a certain amount of waste(d) materials. This led to a practical investigation focusing on the origin of this type of waste(d) materials, and, what are the possibilities for its repurpose? To provide answers, different case studies of existing community initiatives (Fédération des Récupérathèques), circular economy research and moral aspects of our global resources were investigated in the field of design production. A similar material reuse initiative to the analyzed case studies, called “Material Matters!”, was followed under the development and managing phase over several months. Different outcomes stemmed from the research, such as the difficulties of dealing with the intellectual property of waste and problems related to waste resignification or reuse. The project demonstrates the dynamics of waste as misplaced material and the challenge to find different kinds of material (re)use to keep up produced value.
To improve the connection between material consumer and second hand materials, an entire online enviroment was developed. The website includes: shared resource for common glossary, collection of initiatives with frequent Q&A, a step 2 step guide to found a material bank and a page to share open source designs. The web-app instead shift the focus on the cataloguing process. Made to reduce the gap between material consumer and secondhand materials, allow user to visualize which materials are inside the material bank and facilitate the upload from students managing a material bank. Innovative workflows using AI were explored and implemented in the online enviroment.
Logo in the cover by: Francesco Desimine
Material Matters is a non-profit student initiative within the Free University of Bolzano. The aim of the initiative is to recover second-hand materials and make them available (for free) to the community. This happen mainly in the "Cave", the deposit where we store the materials we recover.
Other than the cave, the initiative carry out different activities which are collected and described in the website, realized for this thesis. The online enviroment can be seen at the following link:
Homepage
Information about services the initiative do are shared inside / INITIATIVES
Everything that we learn is shared in the /HOW-2-MAMA page where who wants to open a similar initiative can find useful infos
Open Source tools can be shared in the /MACHINES page
Big thanks to everyone who engaged and will engage in the inititative <3
This project is part of TABULA RASA Open Call by Weigh Station supported by the Youth Policies Office – Autonomous Province of Bolzano, by the Municipality of Bolzano, and *Foundation Südtiroler Sparkasse. Thanks to this funding-initiative from the Youth Office of the Province of Bolzano, I was enable to realize a functioning AI powered webapp that automatically catalogue items.
In the dashboard, the admin can easily upload new items or administrate existing ones
Each Items, when pressed, display more informations
All the AI input are editable in the dashboard
The catalogue, allow, on one side, find out easily what is available in the material banks and, on the other side, facilitate the upload and managing from who is managing the material bank.
What the AI """see"""
AI pipeline
For the binding of the thesis, offcuts of the printing and paper workshop were used. In detail, the red bar comes from the blade-stopper of the cutting paper machine. The paper used is a 12 old paper, leftovers from University. The Plastic cover is recovered from the office supply of an engineering studio now retired (thanks Ing. Giancane!).
The thesis is divided in two volumes. The first one, "Material Matters - Project Documentation", contains all the academic infos about the research and the design output. The second one instead contains the ethnographical research, essays and previous experimentations.
