There is no justification for the throughput of materials involved in junking cars less than 20 years old and encouraging people to buy new electric/hybrid. Even if the old car are purportedly “recycled”, metal recycling produces really terrible jobs. As does mining (often illegal) for e.g. cobalt and lithium needed for electric car batteries.
To be an ecological society we have to stop the whole habit of living despite nature. We must take our pleasure and inspiration in seasonality and ecological particularity.
Let’s just be perfectly clear exactly what is going on. I am crossing town, via two buses, in weather below freezing, for a bunch of
In 2018 you can build your own website in 5 minutes, with no technical skills. You can edit video in your phone. You can do
Interview with Stefan Schridde, founder of the Murks Center against planned obsolescence. Murks means “botch”, or “bad work”. “Products designed with planned obsolescence don’t meet the needs of the society.” He sees cheap consumer goods as “lonely” and the alternative is a “durable” future.
Dinner at Zagreus. Best €36 I’ve ever spent. Every bite was so delightful. Zagreus is an art gallery owned by a chef. Every exhibit inspires
If Disneyland had a farm (and they probably do} it would be The Grounds. It’s farm aesthetic as money machine. And swarming with spenders sucked
So what is the cosmology of food sovereignty? Food is a community, not a commodity… But how do we turn this idea into culture? Alberto Melucci explains how it is that we create culture… through creating new spaces, identities, meanings, identities, commitments….
The Mehl Stübchen is a flour factory which creates flours for many specific uses. They sell to home bakers, rather than to businesses, providing advice
Walking through Kreutzberg/Neukölin I was drawn to another minimalist window display of an unlit store in a residential street. Like most entrepreneurs of shops with
There’s a tiny chill in the air in Neukölln where my friend deposits me for the best burger in Berlin, Schillerburger. I can’t get past
I was going in a different direction, on an arbitrary itinerary when I saw a poster for the Berlin Make Mrkt and figured out that
In a less gentrified yet part of Kreutzberg is this market described by my favourite local food blogger as “the most interesting food in Berlin”.
Four years ago I met a guy in Paris who was delivering measured ingredients for 3 meals for 2 persons once a week. “Because people
The Neustadt neighborhood of Dresden, which was rebuilt by artists after the reunification of Germany, has quite a few artisan manufacturers, including shoes and clothes
“Usually we are cheaper than the discounters, because there’s no middleman.”
This market was so movingly delicious to eye and sense, that I had to just enjoy it rather than documenting it. Produce, baked goods, prepared foods,
“Composting and growing carrots is a nice start, but we need to get rid of the growth economy, make the global economic system work to meet needs, and replace capitalism with a different economic system that works for people. Most Green people are stuck at the level of compost heaps, which don’t have a chance of saving us. We don’t want to be a society full of compost heaps heading for disaster. Growing carrots locally is just the first step to changing the economy.”
Today my beloved MacBook Pro fried its logic board…Why is there so much consumer choice but not what I want?…But my real question is why aren’t companies somebody refurbishing the beautiful, solid old hardware chasses of these classic designs. Convert those BMWs and Mercedes to electric systems? Design lightweight guts for those beautiful PowerBooks and Communicators. If corporate design can’t match vintage classics, then innovative small companies should be designing custom kits to keep these beauties on the road.
Both vertical and horizontal integration being tedious, the new business model is getting out of the business of making things and into the business of
LAB lab A Lab for Interventions, Innovations, Iterations to facilitate: Local Food, Objects, and Quality of Life – Artisan Economics and Meaningful Work – Biospheric
“People see eggs and they ask ‘are these barn raised or free range raised?’ ‘Are they organic or not?’ It baffles me that wine is not the same. Where did it come from? How was it grown? Is it organic? People should be interested in the process and provenance of wine, the same way they are with food.”
I’ve never written, or even articulated, anything about fashion before. But we just saw Mademoiselle C, which displays the eccentricity and waste of high fashion
exhibit: Local Objects artist: Amory Starr gallery: Gaffa, 281 Clarence Street context: Sydney Design Week 2013 run: 25 July – 5 August. opening: 25 July
Since consumption is one of the major places we express our values and try to make a difference in the world, conversations about ethics and
This piece was a curbside find from the South Coast. My sister has developed a habit of txting me when she sees things. It was
At the centre of my design interventions is the idea of working in the margins, on the edge, in the spaces between. “Embodiment” refers to
I was invited to speak at Design your Day Job, organized by &Company, part of Vivid Ideas 2013. 25 May 2013 Sydney Australia I’m new to
Last night I went to see some art, without knowing the topic in advance. And it was another post-apocalyptic.global-warming theme. It was indeed frightening. (Fake
Musicians, hackers, and writers are in mess right now, because they love making stuff and they want to share it, but the internet makes everything
I started teaching a course on this topic in 1995. At that time, the concept was so extremely uninteresting (both to the political economists and
4.22.08 Amory Starr Boston College Sociology Seminar Alternative Consumption Projects’ Use of Social Movement Strategies The paper I distributed is about local food as
I’ve been writing about the ravages of globalization and peoples’ ferocious rejection of its conditions for a long time. I researched and wrote about the
This is written in the context of my summary of social movements literature questions: how shall we understand politicized consumption theoretically. for example, Melucci requires
