Week 17 FabAcademy¶
Applications and implications¶
The final project masterpiece it could be a compost bin for the community garden.
What will it do? This artifact will function as a bin that will allow to the organic matter to decompose; it has many function like allowing the sunlight to heat the organic waste and storage the waste.
Who’s done what beforehand? There are a lot of examples of composters or compost bins, from the one that you can make with cardboard boxes to the one with pallets, clay or more complex with solar panels and a motor for spin the waste. It exist open source design or commercial, for residential use or for gardens or backyards. There are as well for using worms to produce vermicompost.
There are many examples of a compost bins in many blogs or sources.
The action of making compost is not a result of the shape of the compost bin, is a result of the way you do it, the technique, the waste, the space.
What will you design? I will design the way it is going to fit property into a community with defined characteristics, because as many designs it is a response of their needs. From the product design perspective it could be called a product-system service centered in the community.
What materials and components will be used? as a concept, I intent to use any discarded material available; In Barcelona, in many neighborhoods it is very common to find in a given day of the week, discarded pallets in perfect conditions, that could be reuse easily.
The principal material for the artifact could be discarded wood from the pallets but it could be used plywood, plastic, etc.
The second material used are screws, discarded tempered glass and discarded polycarbonate.
Where will come from?
Screws or Nails can be found in any hardware store, but if you use discarded pallet, must of them they have screws that you can reuse.
The plywood or wood come from the discarded pallets. It could be nice to have a blockchain that can trace the origin of the wood used in a pallet to have a life cycle analysis.
How much will they cost? So far I have spent 20 euros and I only have use half of the screws. But, that are the direct costs of the Composter, it has to be counted the indirect costs such as electricity used by the tools (drill and saw).
As a design principle, we intent to be more a open technique rather than a final product, so it could be replicated by any mediums available.
What parts and systems will be made? For this prototype, we use the CNC machine to cut a profile in 15mm plywood, we use that to have an efficient prototype, I have not done something similar, and the intention was to proved the profile and the features of the design as well as the social dynamics around it.
That profile could be documented and shared for later use.
What processes will be used? Another concept explored was the participation by doing, so I encourage the fabrication by hand and with the community. It could be settled one day with the people interested and have a good day building a compost bind eating and sharing.
What questions need to be answered? The compost bin, has to be approached as a design intervention, from a participatory design focus, so first it has to be defined the type of community, the place, the shareholders, the material available, and which technique could be more suitable.
The main question could be, how the process performed in Poblenou could be performed in other neighborhoods.
How will it be evaluated? The compost have a time vector that is something that has to be addressed from the beginning, at least takes 3 months to make compost if it made perfectly, with the many conditions needed. So it has to be evaluated in time, from the effectiveness in the making to the amount of production and the regeneration of the soil. Eventually is going to depend the use for it and the needs of the community.
Another evaluation for the soil is Biological, Physical and Chemical, each have defined procedures to know if the final product is good soil or not. We have seen this evaluations in the AgroBio Zero seminar. This evaluations only measure how the soils is, but not the social engagement of the activity.