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.