Year of Used

Tired of rampant consumerism? The Year of Used project is set to start Jan 1, 2011.

http://www.yearofused.posterus.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Year-Of-Used/172474152775721

The Scoop Table, part 2: Completion

Materials:  Baltic birch, powdercoated steel

Julie Lucus

The following graphic explains how I view the world.  It’s rare that I see something that fits where the red ‘X’ is – there’s a lot of art I like that I wouldn’t want to have.  Julie Lucus’ Burning Man Skull is an exception. 

See her work online or in person at the Sugarhouse Gallery .

http://julielucus.30art.com/ 

http://www.artisticframingco.com/

Nox Contemporary

'untitled', Tyler Spurgeon 2010

There's a new gallery in town.  I had the good fortune to attend the opening of Nox Contemporary and meet John Sproul, one of the directors, and Tyler Spurgeon , an exhibiting artist.  I was especially taken by several of Tyler's paintings depicting (and I'm paraphrasing his comments here) 'the struggles we have with ourselves'.


The current show will be running through Feb 4, 2011.  Please see the 15Bytes article/interview for more information.








http://noxcontemporary.com/default.htm


http://TYLERSPURGEON.COM/home.html


http://www.artistsofutah.org/15bytes/10dec/page4.html

The Canyon Table -- Part 2

I try to prototype like I vote – early and often.  The sooner I can see what the materials/volumes/finishes are going to do, the better design decisions I can make.

The Canyon Table will have a map of the topography formed by the Green and Colorado Rivers.  It is a location that is important to me, as well as a metaphor for our journeys through life, their twists, and confluences with others.

3D modeling programs have their place, and as an artist I find them useful for a quick, inexpensive gut check as to sizes and shapes that might work well.  Google Sketchup is intuitive and has a ton of on-line support.  After that stage, I have yet to find a good replacement for actually trying scraps of the material I will use.

Collaborative Consumption

What would life be like if you didn’t have to actually own the stuff you use everyday?

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ book What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collabortive Consumption explores companies who are trying to provide just that.  Imagine the Netflix business model applied to everything from apartments to cars to lawnmowers, and that’s what they’re talking about. It sounds like a great way to save money, time, and the resources that go into making stuff that sits unused for most of its life in our garages and closets.  But, it requires a fundamental shift in thinking from valuing the ownership of the things in our lives to valuing the utility they give us.  Do we want the powerdrill or do we want the holes that the drill makes?

Some examples:

Airbnb is a site that coordinates travellers with people wanting to rent out anything from couch for the night to a villa for a month.  There are rating systems so that you can rest easy knowing that your host probably isn’t an axe murderer.

Zipcar is a service that allows you to reserve a car any time of the day or night for as little as an hour.

Freecycle coordinates people who have things to get rid of with people who want them.  Their tagline:  “There’s no such thing as waste, just useful stuff in the wrong place”.

TechShop is a series of  workshops on steriods -- they have the space, advice, and tools that any tinkerer would want but few could afford.  Monthly fees give you access to half a million dollars worth of equipment.

Swap.com matches you up with people who have books, CDs, and DVDs you want while coordinating others who want the ones you have.


Now lest anyone gather their pitchforks, burning torches, and mobs and start screaming ‘Socialism!’, let me assure you the collaborative consumption model doesn’t involve government ownership or intervention.  It is a way of organizing group behavior that preserves the individual’s autonomy and freedom, perhaps even more so than our current economic model (credit card debt from the garage full of stuff, anyone?).

There is a high degree of trust required with consuming collaboratively, and hence mechanisms like eBay’s user ratings system have emerged.  In fact, trust between strangers is one of the four principles of successfully collaboratively consuming.  The three others include critical mass (enough people participating to make it work), belief in the commons (the more people that participate, the better it is for everyone), and idling capacity (the stuff being shared needs to be sitting ‘idle’ enough with a single user).

I foresee two major resistances to the collaborative model.

First, companies that make products (cars, toasters, iPods, etc) have built many of their core competencies around the production, marketing, and distribution of that stuff rather than the re-distribution and maintenance of it.  I expect a large resistance from manufacturers as they are asked to profit not from producing and selling but from organizing and redistributing products.  We are, after all, known as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘users’ (or even ‘people’).  Consumers consume things, after all; in the Collaborative Consumption model, we might better be described as ‘sharers’.  It will require a fundamental shift in the corporate DNA of many companies to address this change, from selling the product to selling the function it provides.

Second, many of the profitable business models now using collaborative consumption rely heavily on the internet and its related infrastructures.  Should access to that infrastructure be disrupted or inhibited (by cost, natural disaster, or Godzilla) the geographically dispersed collaborative communities cease to function.

Botsman and Rodgers contend that ‘ . . . the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people.’  With the rise of collaborative consumption, I hope the corrollary is also true.

The Scoop Table -- part 1

There are a few materials that have held my attention for the past 20 years, and plywood is one of them.

Individual sheets of birch plywood

Plywood is really the workhorse of furniture and construction, yet most times it gets covered by a veneer or painted over.  It is the weird old uncle of the wood world, the one everyone likes to have but no one wants to see.

Layers of birch plywood being laminated together

My first explorations into plywood were to make a series of boomerangs – when sanded the plys emerge and make fantastic patterns that visually accent the airfoil shapes needed to make the boomerangs return.  High-end cabinetry often uses birch plywood, which differs from construction-grade plywood in that it has many more sheets laminated together and has virtually no voids from the gluing process.  It is a fantastic material – because of the cutting and orientation of its layers, it expands and contracts very little with the seasons and moisture content of the air.  The grain of each ply is oriented 90 degrees to the last, so it can be ripped on the table saw in any direction without much worry of splitting, and it can be loaded across each axis as well.  In addition, when sanded through the plys, the end-grain alternates and gives the edge a striped pattern.  Why we would want to hide such a fantastic material underneath a veneer I don’t know.

One of my current projects is to make a steel-based table with a carved plywood top.

 

Metal can actually deform significantly when welded, and I take a lot of precautions to insure that it remains in the shape I want it to.  Often times I will tack weld all of the pieces together before giving it the full weld bead, this way it holds itself in proportion as the individual parts want to expand and contract with the heat of the welder.  In this case I even tack welded extra supports for stability on the cantilevered parts that will be removed later.

Tack welds

Full weld beads ground down