FREE RADICALS
Meet the innovators who preach the ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’ mantra to inform, educate and inspire.
Meet the innovators who preach the ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’ mantra to inform, educate and inspire
“We must find a new economic understanding that looks at sustainability” — FIONA LYDA
MORALITY AND EXPANSIVE MODERNITY have long been difficult bedfellows, but in the dawning of a post-materialist age, aesthetics are committing to ethics. It’s a relationship shift from the why of it to the how, as a few free radicals of science and design turn market dislocation and discards into major opportunities. Here, we doff our hats to the doers shaping a principled path to beautiful living.
THE VISIONARY
PROFESSOR VEENA SAHAJWALLA
The projection to a future in which waste is considered a valuable resource rather than a scourge on the planet might sound like science fiction rather than science fact, but for Professor Veena Sahajwalla, that apocryphal tomorrow is bona fide and beginning now. Is she talking garbage? You bet.
As a materials engineer and Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow who founded and directs the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the University of New South Wales, Sahajwalla game-changed the disposal of waste more than a decade ago, when her research led to the commercialisation of the world’s first ‘green steel’ manufacturing process.
Using recycled rubber tyres from end-of-life vehicles as part replacement for the coal-based carbon in electric arc furnace steelmaking, Sahajwalla proved that the elements essential to making steel could release from the molecular structure of these discarded objects when subjected to precise high-temperature conditions. Her patented process required less energy, reduced both the carbon emissions and the ‘slag’ waste of traditional smelter, and reframed rubbish as a valuable resource. It has resulted in her being awarded the 2017 Jubilee Professorship by the Indian Academy of Sciences. The proposition behind this paradigmshifting discovery, with its alchemising potential to turn the estimated yearly discard of 1 trillion plastic bags and 1.5 billion car tyres into cities of steel, was, according to Sahajwalla, seeded on the streets of Mumbai. “There’s the noise, the pollution, the factories and the incredible dynamic of life that goes on around you,” she says, recalling the furious energy of the city in which she spent her childhood. “One of the things I found so appealing was the entrepreneurial economy based on end-of-life materials. Nothing was ever seen as waste. Your little glass medicine bottle might be collected, taken away, cleaned and re-used for another purpose. Much to the annoyance of my parents, I actively participated in this economy, but I claimed that I was helping them clean up while making my pocket money.” Still connecting to that childhood thrill of watching ‘ waste warriors’ extract value from innocuous discard, Sahajwalla has recently evolved her technology into the UNSW-funded ‘ e-waste microfactory’. This prototype factory, which fields the fastest-growing area of waste in Australia, works on the back of various modules made to deal with detritus at a local community level.
“We don’t need a big smelter to extract the value,” says Sahajwalla of the alloys, including precious metals that stream offshore or to landfill. “These microfactories can transform waste where it is created and stockpiled, enabling local businesses and communities to not only tackle waste but to develop a commercial opportunity from the valuable materials that are created.” unsw.edu.au
THE PIONEER FIONA LYDA
As shopping increasingly splays off into omni-channel platforms powered by the insights of big data, there’s something reassuringly slow-time and solid about bricks-and-mortar retail. It is the new exotic for a generation of digital natives who, nurtured on the ephemeral, prefer its tactility and eye-to-eye trust to online purchase.
But too few traders get the mindset of millennials, now the largest market force on the planet. They expect responsibility, in its full ethical spectrum, to underscore their retail experience. Yes, morality is the new black, as we become the choices we make.
“It is the only way forward,” says Fiona Lyda, owner-operator of design store Spence & Lyda, who began championing altruism and ethics two decades before this demographic began impacting design. “The mantra of ‘it is business’ justifying the price hike on a lifesustaining drug because it’s market-driven is not acceptable. We all have a responsibility for the wellbeing of our fellow man — and that means not taking advantage of our position.” Lyda concedes that the attitude flies in the face of free-market economies but argues that this model has to change. “Our current economists do not understand a model that doesn’t include constant growth,” she says. “We must find a new economic understanding that looks at sustainability, not constant growth, or we are lost.” Walking the talk with design collaborations that prioritise proposition over profit, Lyda participated in the PET Lamp project — Spanish designer Alvaro Catalán de Ocón’s luminous efforts to repurpose the PET plastic bottles choking the Amazon. More recently, she aided in the birthing of Adelaide furniture designer Jon Goulder’s Innate collection, a capsule of furniture pieces that posit the question of an Australian aesthetic in moulded saddle leathers, black-as-night Adelaide granite and pickled Tasmanian timbers.
Innate alludes to Lyda’s instincts with design and her long-held belief that we must sustain the creative endeavours and critically endangered ecosystems within this country.
“One of the current conundrums in our industry is the love of imported woods,” she says. “This notion of shipping timber all over the world has clear negatives, so we have sought to showcase our Australian native timbers. We have treated them with reverence — and, to that end, we have chosen not to coat the timber in a skin of paint but to colour them with an organic process that reacts naturally with the tannins in the wood.
“I remember my daughter asking Alvaro if he saw himself as an environmental designer,” adds Lyda in response to the question of a deeper moral consciousness now surfacing in design. “He said that, for him, taking the Earth and its resources into account was an imperative that was encompassed in the notion of good design. He was correct. Environmental responsibility should be a given at this point.” spenceandlyda.com. au ››
THE CONCEPTUALIST DALE HARDIMAN
What a load of old rubbish! It’s a descriptor rather than a denigrator of Melbourne designer Dale Hardiman’s vibrant Common Resources, a collection of Pop-primitive furnishings that are the cartoonish consequence of applying concrete compound and coloured rubber to a Frankenstein-hybrid of found objects.
“I’m happy for the work to be defined by what it is made from,” says Hardiman, who uses such conceptual projects to balance his day-to-day business at Dowel Jones — the design studio he co-founded with Adam Lynch to make affordable furniture from minimal material and process. “Rubbish as a raw material isn’t a new idea, but it is one that should be adopted more often.” Exhibiting under Designwork 02 — the second iteration of gallerist Sophie Gannon’s engagement with the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week (MDW) — Common Resources is Hardiman’s exploration into the increasingly mechanised and globalised production of furniture.
“The early work for Common Resources identified the household kitchen as the most common workshop,” he says, nominating cutlery and saucepans as its tools. “Why do we keep developing large and complicated machines to make furniture and objects when rudimentary skills serve the same purpose?”
The question cut to the curatorial core of MDW’s Design Effects theme, but the pricing and placement of Hardiman’s work in the white cube of Gannon’s gallery potentially gives the cynics aim at just another gratuitous folly flogging itself as sustainability. Is it all a wry post-post-modern pastiche of Ikea parts smothered with impasto, or is there perhaps a deeper point?
“Having grown up as part of a generation completely consumed by technology, this work reacts to the growing separation between material use and the understanding of its impact,” says Hardiman. “Furniture is an interesting typology that, outside the research and development of, say, ergonomic chairs, has remained the same as it has been for some time.”
Less of an effort to elevate function into art form than a theoretical challenging of the stasis and state of design production relative to unrestrained consumerism, Common Resources reminds of the dire consequences of designing for disposability. dale-hardiman.com ››
THE GAME-CHANGERS NIGHTINGALE HOUSING
Population growth, housing prices and an unchecked property market have scored a shameful dirge about dollars trumping good design into the skyline of Melbourne — but on the city’s fringes, a sweeter song is issuing from a powerful little bird.
Meet the men and women of Nightingale Housing, a not-for-profit group, premised on providing multi-residential constructs, which delivers ‘at cost’ apartments close to the community heart. They are laying the new shell of an architecture that proves low price and high principle are comfortable cohabitants.
“Nightingale Housing licenses leading Australian architects to run projects that embody its principles,” says Lola Digby-Diercks, the organisation’s business development lead. “The projects must deliver in terms of affordability, total transparency, sustainability, deliberative design and community contribution. Nightingale provides support to each project… before each dwelling is balloted.” Referring to the waiting list that registers for an apartment before going into the draw for its allocation, Digby-Diercks adds that successful buyers must sign a restrictive covenant over the resale of their lot, ensuring that savings are passed on to the next purchaser. This model was hatched in 2014 on the back of The Commons, a development in the inner northern suburb of Brunswick designed by Breathe Architecture that won awards for multiple housing and sustainable architecture at the 2014 Australian Institute of Architects National Architecture Awards. Articulating the beliefs of Breathe founder Jeremy McLeod that housing could be more than a commodity, the concept behind The Commons prioritises the interests of owner-occupiers over financial yields in a materially reductive, energy-efficient block that made high design the province of typically out-priced buyers by ditching such ‘excess’ as a basement car park.
As an owner-occupier of the complex, McLeod, an architect, explains that The Commons exceeded his expectations in terms of community. “The residents hold monthly craft and drawing classes in their apartments, tend to the gardens on the roof together, have progressive dinners together,” he says. “They are generous and considerate of one another and it is a loving building to live in.” Pushing this prototype into a collaborative enterprise with like-minded colleagues including Architecture Architecture, Austin Maynard Architects, Clare Cousins Architects, MRTN Architects and Wolveridge Architects, McLeod and his design pals plunged their investment dollars into the five-level Nightingale 1 in Brunswick to ensure its success.
Their vision of collective nesting — deeply ‘green’ and driven by communal sharing — might have been a hard sell, but the marketplace thinks not. With 12 Nightingale projects currently in development and a waiting list of 3000 hopeful residents, the Nightingale’s song has been heard. ››
THE ENVIRONMENTALIST BRODIE NEILL
As a designer morally aroused by the abuse of ecosystems, Brodie Neill has long made the point about the pursuit of short-term profits in pieces that seamlessly marry digital technology with craft tradition. But the international tipping point for the Tasmanian-born activist, creative director and self-described “default designer”, who has lived in London for the last 12 years, came with the commission to create a piece for the Australian Pavilion at the 2016 London Design Biennale. Theming to the politicised ideal of a Utopia by Design, this inaugural global event played to Neill’s pet passions. He decided to illustrate his concerns about the estimated 150 million tonnes of plastics polluting the ocean in a piece that contemporised the 19th-century specimen table, a glory display of the precious stones plundered from lands far away.
“We took the microplastics, the stuff that is coating the coastlines of the world, and treated them as the equivalent of the winemaker’s grapes,” he says of the weathered blue-and-green composite that was inlaid into the Gyro Table, so-called after the currents circulating ‘soups’ of plastics around the planet. “They are precious bits that we reappraised as gems and re-contextualised in an object that makes people think about their everyday practices.”
To the question of where these ‘gems’ were sourced, Neill recalls joining with the like minds of marine science and sending out the
“We need to become innovators, not just lobbyists” — BRODIE NEILL
call on social media for beachcombers of the world to aid in bagging washed-up plastics. The reaction was immediate and immeasurable. From Cornwall in the United Kingdom to the once-pristine beaches on Bruny Island, part of Neill’s home state of Tasmania, the stuff poured in for cleaning, processing and colour-coding into sacks of micro-bits that became known as ‘ocean terrazzo’.
They arrange in latitudinal and longitudinal display in the circular surface of the Gyro Table — which, suggestive of the urgency for round-table talks on single-use plastics, seditiously draws the viewer into its galactic haze. Exhibiting amid the maritime history paintings as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2018 Triennial, the Gyro Table made its most eloquent point about the conquering impulses of man and their consequences.
“Because we can just channel our waste back into a circular economy, oil and mining companies keep pulling raw materials out of the Earth’s core,” says Neill. “We don’t really need more, but I think we need to lighten up about practice and process. We need to become innovators, not just lobbyists.”
Parlaying the ‘ocean terrazzo’ of microplastics into a commercial venture that motivates beach clean-ups and creates revenue streams for charities, Neill is leading an aesthetic movement that questions the morality of both consumer and creator choice. “Is it time for a sea change?” he asks. “You bet!”