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Out of Style = Out of Luck?
Bad chair day: When 90’s fashion makes a roaring comeback and appreciation of crop tops and chokers is high, but adoration of overstuffed floral chairs is not. Bad human day: We’ve built global systems that fuel planned obsolescence over local reinvention for the community good. Discarding something fully functional when a fabric or shape feels outdated or out-of-style is a highly conditioned behavior and often, is intentionally, the easiest option available. Good Earth day: Padded seating is highly malleable. A talented reupholsterer can breathe fresh new life into ANY well-made piece. The potential to customize and reinvent a seat/chair/sofa/couch is limited only by one’s imagination. Now that’s a strategy that…
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Market Transformation or Cultural Transaction
We know how to account for embedded carbon and energy in products, but what about the cultural training to find beauty and seek potential in slightly imperfect things? Who provides the skills and training to work with existing materials rather than virgin ones? Our future climate reality will demand this mindset and this skill set. How are we preparing–do we see this as a market transaction or a cultural transformation?
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A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?
A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that? What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore. That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for…
