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The ecological imperative at the basis of this project
needs hardly be justified, what with the quantity of
research and literature it has engendered in recent
years.
A new domain of scientific exploration has evolved in
response to the need to reduce the environmental impact of consumption, offering the designer new tools
to develop eco-friendly products. William McDonough
and Michael Braugart (2002) argue that Re-Cycling
should more realistically be called Down-Cycling, since
the reprocessing required to reintroduce materials into
the production chain degrades them to the point that
they can often not support more than one iteration of
this process before having to be definitely discarded.
A better understanding of the emotional relationship
between consumers and the products of their physical environment is seen by many as a very promising
avenue towards reduced consumption. Much current
design research is aimed at finding ways to optimize the long term attachment between a product and its user.
Based on the above findings, Metacycling aims to define
an alternative model of consumption based on product
longevity. This concept, based on the rejuvenation of
products through the use of distributed Rapid Prototyping
technology, will be implemented by linking consumers and
designers through an interactive framework and a process
known as Participatory Design (PD). This process puts the
designer and end user into direct contact and assures that
user requirements are fully defined and taken into account.
There's no doubt that there are tremendous advantages
to the creation of a virtual community: the exponential
development of creative ideas or even the possibility of
finding unexpected new vocations for widely distributed
commercially successful products, now obsolete. Imagine
the commercial and environmental benefits of giving new
life to such products and the enthusiasm that this would
generate amongst a virtual community of designers and
users.
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