Alexander Taylor - Fold Lamp

Fold Lamp
Alexander Taylor, 2004
This black table lamp is constructed from a powder-coated aluminum sheet folded into a traditional form and accented with a braided fabric cable and red cord.

Knitting Curtain rails

Jasper Morrison

The series of chairs by Jasper at the Design Museum explore mono material objects. This cork chair is milled from a solid block of cork, the process means there are no joints or mixing of materials. The material could easily be re-mined.

Skip Cam 1

I sent out disposable cameras to willing skip companies to take photos of the contents of skips. I am still waiting for them to be sent back...

Next step

Context report finished, now to write a brief that brings it all together into one achievable project. There are three aspects of my work I want to realise. Firstly, continuing the skip attachments looking to keep a social aspect to my work. The aim is to transform the impression the public have of skips. Not to see them as dirty waste but as a great resource. The theory of phüsis, that which Aristotle describes in nature as ‘movedeness’, if applied to design can at the very least reduce waste. If taken further it can transform the contents of a skip into a series of challenges for restarting the movement. I begin to be unclear again. What I mean is that nature doesn’t produce waste, in the sense that all substances move through different forms in a continuous cycle. These forms which we perceive as seed, sapling, tree, dead wood, rotten wood, mulch etc. are moments along which a cycle of ‘movedness’. Though it is always what it intends to be, it is constantly moving towards what it intends to become. If we look at design, and for arguments sake call it outside of nature, then we see our objects as finished. Chair, table, hat, bath, book; are considered finished and unmoving. Obviously this means that when they are no longer wanted, there is no vision of the table becoming something else and it is therefore treated as waste to fill up landfill. Bringing a sense of phüsis into design, how I see it at least, would treat waste as the end of one stage and need for movement into another. This could be considered (and sometimes is) after the object becomes waste. But could (rarely is) be considered at the objects inception. So by examining the reasons for an object becoming unwanted or wasted, I can design the object again with a function built in to counteract this in the form of a movement to a new state, function or subject object relationship.

The shape I envisage this taking, as I said before, is split three ways. Social activity around a skip will uncover the reasons for waste and provide contact with users. Physically archiving the reasons for objects becoming waste will help us learn them and provide the knowledge needed for the third part, designing solutions applied to an objects inception.

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