As a child, Brenden Macaluso was fascinated with mechanical objects. He began repairing engines and vintage machines at age 10 and has never stopped. Since 2007, Brenden has been working to apply sustainability practices to Industrial Design. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design from the University of Houston in 2008. His thesis project, Recompute, examined applied sustainability via the product life cycle and was globally recognized. He founded Common Motor Collective in 2013, a support company empowering DIY users to repair and maintain vintage motorcycles by providing access to obsolete parts, technical information, and active knowledge exchange.
Abstract:
Humans have been producing mass-manufactured goods for about a century and the landfill has become the de facto “end of the road” for many objects. As users, we never consider what road our objects are traveling down; as designers, we don’t always consider that our work will eventually become garbage. With commoditization, planned obsolescence, and the “short sell” steering the direction of product development, the cycle of “produce, consume and discard” continues to increase in scale and speed.
Applying sustainability principles to industrial design must go beyond the simple ideas of materials used and the energy consumption of the object. The considerations for applied sustainability in ID need to examine the granularity of a product’s lifecycle including initial energy & resource investment, manufacturing processes, projected service timeline, parts, repairability, support service, knowledge documentation, and the foreseeable contexts of human interactions with the object. The idea of “Long Life Design” creates objects that maximize utility over time and provide the proper “end of the road” actions.
In this presentation we will take a look at examples of applied sustainable ideas and seek to answer the following questions:
Who is responsible for dealing with the things that have been made, the producers, retailers, users? Is there a better place for objects beyond the landfill? What do we do with the things we’ve already made?
