Contagion, or the way disease, disgust and dirt circulates, how the effects of dirt transfer to bodies, and how harm is conceptualized, is central to discard studies. From miasma, through the germ theory of disease, and now for chronic, pervasive models of pollution brought about by endocrine distributors and radiation, theories of contagion have been […]
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Guest post by Mathew Lippincott. Originally posted on Mediashift’s Idea Lab. Detritivores are creatures that consume decaying matter. Detritivore designs use abundant waste products to make scalable technology solutions. Unlike loftier concepts of zero-waste design such as Cradle to Cradle, Detritivore design accepts that the world is already loaded with discarded and broken technology. Detritivore designers need […]
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By Max Liboiron. Around one hundred Cooper Union students are in the third day of occupying the office of their president. The protest comes after a vastly unpopular decision by their board of trustees, lead by school president Bharucha, to end their more than 100 year tradition of a tuition-free school. They are fighting against an […]
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Via Reid Lifset, editor of Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE): Over the past two decades governments around the world have been experimenting with a new strategy for managing waste. By making producers responsible for their products when they become wastes, policy makers seek to significantly increase the recycling-and recyclability-of computers, packaging, automobiles, and household hazardous […]
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By Max Liboiron. “When I got to get the stuff in the bucket, first I go down the far left edge of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the far right side of the pile, dump it in. Then I go down the middle. So everything fits in the back of the […]
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The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition via the Tate Modern that explores the materiality, nature, biography and archive of missing works of art.The website explains: Destroyed, stolen, rejected, erased, ephemeral. Some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost, and can no longer be seen. Some artworks […]
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By Max Liboiron. Measurements are never mere faithful representations of nature, but have social and political origins and ramifications. In representational theory, measurement is “the correlation of numbers with entities that are not numbers,” a process of transformation, translation, and even interpretation at the level of sampling and gathering data. What is selected for measurement and what is […]
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By Zoltán Glück Originally published in Tidal on March 13, 2013 In the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy the inequalities at the heart of New York City could scarcely be missed. While hundreds of thousands of public housing residents went without heat, hot water or electricity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rushed to get the stock […]
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Basurama (trash-o-rama), a non profit organization based in Spain, is preparing a public waste audit for MIT’s Media Lab Festival on April 20th. Their unique point of intervention that goes above and beyond a regular waste audit and the goal of quantification and classification of waste, is how to represent two tons of waste. Basurama […]
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By Max Liboiron. Nearly a year ago, I posted about a lawsuit brought against the City of New York by the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street for trashing thousands of books during the eviction of Zuccoti Park. The story resonated with a lot of people because the destruction of books is seen as a special type of waste […]
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Discard Studies 