Metacycle aims to optimize the creative potential of artists and designers by reuniting them within a virtual community serving the common objective of prolonging the life span of consumer products. This international virtual community would foster links between consumers wanting to renew their material goods and the creative talents that can offer them innovative solutions that lessen the damaging impacts that traditional mass consumption causes to the environment. The goal of this project is to develop an interactive framework through which consumers can benefit from unique and innovative updates to products whose usefulness is being put into question. The implementation of such a new virtual community describes a new paradigm for the creation of objects in which users can participate themselves in the formulation of their material world. Relying heavily on the exploitation of Rapid Prototyping technologies, the pooling of a large number of creative minds allows the generation of a new category of unique products that favour increased attachment through personalization.

As researchers, the interest of this project resides in the fact that it leads us to widen our spectrum of activity, through the promotion of our work to a large public. This project moves our work out of the lab and heads towards the people who will benefit from such a sustainable design approach. We have the strong intention of creating a broad network and to collaborate with other researchers, research institutes, designers, inventors as well as the public at large. Our interest is to put in practice our research and to share ideas with people who have similar ethical and environmental concerns.