Floating Waste Floating Life

Strangely familiar may be the term that defines the debate of how we remain ethical and critical consumers even with our constant desire for change. Jonathan Bell (1) proposes that we look at architecture's ability to sustain and suggests we carry these values on to design for everyday life. An experiment that will challenge us to aim for long lasting values and emotional attachment in what we design. What happens then if you look at architecture as the shell we can exist within, the security for us not to be eaten up by the constant changes, and then see 'design for everyday life' as exactly marks of change; a sort of object-diary of our lives and being? It then becomes an even bigger challenge to transfer the sustainability of (some!) architecture to the design of objects. It could be suggested that with a mobile home both objects and architecture may remain for longer as our desire for change can be fulfilled through the changing location we find ourselves at. We will then live a nomadic life, where the search for survival will remain, not in the form of feed for animals, but in stimulation of the modern man. The desire to collect and keep will then be a design task to solve, we can only travel with limited goods but we may wish to know we will remain through the traces we leave behind. It remains ironic that the search for survival can no longer in many areas of our part of the world only be limited to food, shelter and health for us to feel human, when our ethics are now more than ever in bad need for a burst of sustainable realization.

Susan Collis art takes quite some time to discover especially if you don't know you are looking for something - maybe this principle can be applied to design to expand lifetime of an object and maintain interest?

Check the link or her piece currently displayed at V&A South Kensington.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1637_outoftheordinary/artists_detail.php?artistTag=collis

Photo from Living Design - 'Maisson Flottante', designed by Bouroullec brothers

(1) Bell, J. Ruins, Recycling, Smart Buildings, and the Endlessly Transformable Environment. In Blauvelt, A. Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life. Minneapolis

(2) Hinte, Ed van. Eternally Yours: Time in Design. 010 Publishers. Rotterdam, 2004