Projeto Waste2No no Festival Internacional CulturaDigital.Br

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My name is Alejandro Lopez Hernandez, I’m a designer, architect, and hardware hack based out of Toronto Canada. Today I’m here to present Waste2no, a design research project I’ve been working over the past year that focuses on my interests in three things: 1. the internet of things; 2. Responsive Architecture; and 3. sustainable cities. Waste2no is the product of a collaborative workshop at the AEDES Network Campus Berlin, a Master's of Architecture thesis at the University of Toronto and a Design Jam and some collaboration at Toronto's Think Tank Lab.

I'm interested in the question of how the internet of things (and smart environments of the near future) will be designed or rather can be designed? (Since Mark Weiser's Ubiquitous Computing 1, the notion that technology is going to make life easier and more seamless has generally become accepted.) It's not news that computing is becoming more physical and pervasive in our environments and in our cities. But ultimately who will design, build and use the smart environments of the near future and for what purposes?

In the film Minority Report, there is this scene where John Anderston, the main character played by Tom Cruise walks into a shopping mall and these slick personalized advertisements appear all over his physical environment. In this scenario the smart environment is being used by Lexus, BLV and the GAP to reinforce the same wasteful shopping behavior we see today. I think that its possible to imagine through design a better scenario if we ask the right questions.

Rather than using the internet of things to reinforce what is already out there, would it be possible to consider a future where the internet of things makes out cities more sustainable and inclusive? And also more unique, not the same.

The people at the Institute for the Future seem to think so... their vision is of a planet of civic laboratories. More than half of the world's people are living in cities. In Brazil and Canada the figure is over 80%. As technology becomes cheaper and data becomes more available it becomes easier to turn every city into a civic laboratory. The idea is to adapt the technology to the local context (be it environmental or cultural).

The laboratory I have been working in is the City of Toronto, Canada.

This is the open source technology I have been using to test new design ideas. The project questions ‘passive’ technocratic approaches to sustainability where networked self-regulating systems automatically handle environmental performance leaving the agency of the user out of the equation .

In the next part of the presentation I'm going to take you through my project Waste2no. An interactive system for the buying, selling, sharing, swapping and remaking things in cities. This project is a design speculation on how the internet of things may a new type of urban infrastructure that enhances sustainability and agency.

An interesting fact about consumer goods in cities is that they are the largest producer of C02 in cities. A new inventory of the Portland metropolitan area shows that the bulk of the region's greenhouse gases come from the production of stuff, not from home energy use and transportation.

How can we waste less things?

Why do we know so much about the suppy chain and so little about the supply chain?

This is the supply chain, basically shopping

This is the removal chain, the waste system

What if we could design ways to disrupt this chain and eliminate waste. This project will consider bringing the sophistication of the supply chain to the removal chain!

What does the new chain look like?

I think the new chain is more decentralized, and can be based on relationships between people thanks to the social web

Things can be easily shared, swapped, exchanged thanks to the social web.

Why is this important? This is the typical user patter for most consumer goods. Buy use and waste

As an alternative to the dominant consumer product use pattern (buy, use, dispose) the Waste2no project explores new less wasteful modes of interaction between people and things. As an alternative to the dominant consumer product use pattern (buy, use, dispose) the Waste2no project explores new less wasteful modes of interaction between people and things. Reusing, swapping, sharing and selling can reduce the amount of products we consume, averting waste and making less demands on materials upstream.

Take the relationship between people and things.

What if this relationship is mediated by readily available thing sensing technology such as RFID, QR and Barcodes, etc., as well as a web application Technology makes sharing fun and seamless! Things can communicate information about themselves to their environment what kind of opportunities for new behaviors around the culture of shopping can be imagined?

The technology is contextualised around the culture of shopping and exchanging in the City of Toronto

The challenge of making such a system successful is in fostering a community that has the tools to take ownership of it. As citizens we can imagine, make and design our own infrastructure.