Living aboard a sailboat, away from reliable internet connectivity, outside of delivery networks, forces us to explore ways with which we can strenghten and simplify the toolset onto which we rely.

We must abandon 3-in-1 packages, bloated always-online services and general planned obsolesce, and establish practices of recyclism, minimum viable products, small-sharp modular utilities. We see smart and resilience as opposing attributes to a device, smart is inherently contrary to a single purpose tool, and thus incompatible with longtermism.

Our focus over the past years has gradually shifted toward open-source software and modular(combinable) electronics. Looking back, we are proud of the open-source tools that we created, enabling a handful of people to exit subscription services, and inscrutable closed-source utilities. Moving forward, we begin to consider hardware, or at least software that resides closer to the metal.

Join this live conversation to hear the stories of two designers, Isatu Harrison and Maxwell Mutanda, from Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. We will also be joined by Hannah Robinson, the lead at the British Council for architecture, design and fashion programmes across Sub Saharan Africa. In this session, we will discuss:

1. The circular economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. Who is pushing for this?
2. The role of design in the transition to a circular economy. What does this mean for a rapidly growing youth population?
3. Practical examples of stories and projects already taking place.

Precious Plastic exists to reduce plastic waste.
Sometimes we do it through boosting recycling. Sometimes through new biodegradable materials. Some other time by adopting zero waste lifestyles.
Whatever works.

We can no longer take the reproduction of our world for granted, or assume that the work of nature will take place automatically. Reproducing life on Earth will require a great deal more assistance from us, in our simultaneously extraordinary and limited capacities as a single species on a planet of millions. It will also require a great deal more recognition of the assistance provided by all those other species. What the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis calls “full surrogacy” — a call to distribute labor more broadly, to cultivate reciprocal practices of kinship and care — is as applicable to our nonhuman relationships as to our human ones.

We are cognitively impaired by a metabolic rift between our culture and the earth. Paved surfaces, and pervasive media, shield us from direct experience of the damage our actions inflict on soils, oceans, air, and forests. A unique epoch of energy and resource abundance added zest to a story of growth, and progress and development, that put the interests of ‘the economy’ above all other concerns

The project’s main output will be an integrated approach to supporting citizen repair: a digital infrastructure that supports self-repair, repairing together (in repair cafés or repair centres), and repairing with professional support. To sustain this infrastructure beyond the project lifetime, business and policy models will be developed with a view to setting up a European Open Repair Data Platform.

Though IBM had capitalized for decades on terms associated with intelligence and thought—its earlier trademarked corporate slogan was “Think”—smart was by 2008 an adjective attached to many kinds of computer-mediated technologies and places, including phones, houses, cars, classrooms, bombs, chips, and cities. Palmisano’s “smarter planet” tagline drew on aspects of these earlier invocations of smartness, and especially the notion that smartness required an extended infrastructure that produced an environment able to automate many human processes and respond in real time to human choices. His speech also underscored that smartness demanded an ongoing penetration of computing into infrastructure to mediate daily perceptions of life.

Moving from a linear to a circular economy means minimising the waste and pollution by reducing, recycling and reusing. The City of Amsterdam aims to redesign twenty product- or material chains.

The rapid technical evolution of additive manufacturing (AM) enables a new path to a circular economy using distributed recycling and production. This concept of Distributed Recycling via Additive Manufacturing (DRAM) is related to the use of recycled materials by means of mechanical recycling process in the 3D printing process chain. This paper aims to examine the current advances on thermoplastic recycling processes via additive manufacturing technologies. After proposing a closed recycling global chain for DRAM, a systematic literature review including 92 papers from 2009 to 2019 was performed using the scopus, web of science and springer databases. This work examines main topics from six stages (recovery, preparation, compounding, feedstock, printing, quality) of the proposed DRAM chain. The results suggested that few works have been done for the recovery and preparation stages, while a great progress has already been done for the other stages in order to validate the technical feasibility, environmental impact, and economic viability. Potential research paths in the pre-treatment of recycled material at local level and printing chain phases were identified in order to connect the development of DRAM with the circular economy ambition at micro, meso and macro level. The development of each stage proposed using the open source approach is a relevant path to scale DRAM to reach the full technical potential as a centerpiece of the circular economy.

The concept of Green FabLab is the intersection of several societal trends. From one side, there have been an growing interesting in the additive manufacturing technology (a.k.a 3D printing) technology. The creation of the fantastic RepRap Projet, an open source project, opened up many possibilities in terms of appropiation for the 3D printing technology, doing the filament fused deposition the most used technique in the additive manufacturing world.