This text is based on the notes I had prepared for a talk and a workshop at FAB25 in Brno (Czechia), as well as insights based on other talks and conversations before and during the conference in Brno and Prague. It positions the groundwork and first insights leading to the Reuse Academy, a project I started to conceptualise recently and expect to give more concrete steps towards in the coming months. The Reuse Academy builds on prior work - mine and of others - and is planned to be open and inclusive.
The days in Czechia gave me the opportunity to chat with plenty of bright people, refine ideas, and acquire new perspectives. Good parts of the text below will be nothing new to those who already read my previous writing on inclusive circularity, communities, and material reuse. In any case, the tension between reiteration and divergence is central to my way of doing things (as some of you may be aware), so I'm posting this longish - while admittedly redundant - version.
Too long, won't read? Jump straight to the Reuse Academy section. I'll also update and keep maintaining processual documentation of the project through this wiki page. If you are interested and want to go deeper into this and similar topics, drop me a line and I'll invite you to a telegram group called reuse city lab.
(almost) a joke
If I'm being honest, the idea of proposing a lightning talk for FAB25 with the title "Reuse Academy: how to reuse (almost) anything" started partly as a joke. Surely, I have been questioning the uncritical adoption of digital fabrication as a simple answer to complex problems for more than a decade. That said, I certainly do see many positive aspects of the fab movement, in particular stemming from its roots connected to hands-on innovation and a strong focus on community-weaving. The main issue I have, though, is how the discourse centred on making and fabrication is narrowly perceived and adopted outside the fab world.
Time and again, I've seen top-down 'fab' projects sidelining existing initiatives that had a deeper grasp of local realities, social aspirations, and understood the manifold challenges about territory, history, and culture affecting local realities. On some such occasions, grassroots organisations which had taken a long time crafting projects that made sense to and were trusted by their constituent communities eventually felt forced to label their work as 'making', changing their vocabulary and objectives to adapt to funding pressure from the institutions supporting them. When you change your vocabulary - not by virtue of organic local dynamics but rather to adapt to what external funders expect your initiative to perform -, you change your practices, assumptions, and expectations. That often results in a situation of conforming to a market-oriented framing which generates outputs more valuable to external agents than to the community they are supposed to benefit. In some cases, that phenomenon also produces micro-celebrities more interested in aligning with external partners than in establishing meaningful conversation with their local peers. I'm concerned with the long-term effects of such dynamics.
Those contradictions are certainly not exclusive to the fab and maker movements. I remember once talking to a pioneer of open-source software and feeling uncomfortable as he described an educational project of his creation. He said something to the effect of “we do something here, learn from it, and replicate it everywhere - as a cookie cutter”. That is one of the problems I have with techno-solutionism. Expecting that any solution can be simply scaled and replicated everywhere else by repetition is a misleading assumption. Especially regarding complex social, economic and political issues. I'd rather have my cookies shaped by human hands.
To be clear: of course the fab community has - or more precisely, the smart and well-intentioned people who constitute a great part of the fab community have - a huge potential to help achieve the kind of change much needed to face the challenges of present times. Many of those people have concretely enabled transformative practices in many parts of the world for years already. But we must be conscious of how a superficial and homogeneous vision of digital making frequently imposes biases and tilts power balance in many localities. While there are many fields of activity in which these effects can be seen, in this text I want to focus on one of the topics that interests me most: the reuse of materials that still retain potential value.
My decades of community-oriented work have always privileged repair and reuse over fabrication. Hence the tongue-in-cheek subtitle for my proposed talk: "how to reuse" instead of "how to make". For those reading this text who are not familiar with the canons of the Fab universe, a short explanation is due. About two decades ago, Professor Neil Gershenfeld from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms championed the creation of "Fab Labs", or laboratories for digital fabrication. He had then been teaching for a longer time a course titled "How to make (almost) anything". Through the following years, Fab Labs became a movement, quickly growing to tens, then hundreds, up to thousands worldwide nowadays. The movement structures and regenerates itself through the international Fab Conferences such as the one I attended this year, an educational programme called the Fab Academy, and direct cooperation projects among Fab Labs and between Fab Labs and other organisations.
The half-joke comes partly from my feeling of lying at the border. Until recently, I would certainly not consider myself part of the fab community. As I wrote some years ago, I'm more of a gambiarra kind of guy. Though arguably elements like improvisation (and failures), repurposing, and technological disobedience are very much present in the daily life of Fab Labs and makerspaces, those are not among their most celebrated aspects in public discourse. Furthermore, my personal journey took a parallel path for some years since I first heard about Fab Labs. I went for deep dives on experimental digital culture, open and collaborative science, design for community initiatives, among other topics.
Lately, though, I've noticed that many people that I admire (for instance those that I met through GOSH and GIG) and whose opinions I deeply respect are indeed involved with the fab context. That led me to pay more attention and eventually submit two proposals accepted for this year's programme: the lightning talk I just mentioned above, and a longer "theoretical workshop" to discuss ideas around a project I'm currently leading at GIG: the Circular Material Valuer Curriculum. What follows is an expanded version of what I tried to cover in my talk, with some expansions that I touched upon in the workshop and some additional stories and references.
Lightning talk: Reuse Academy
My talk in Brno juxtaposed things I've done over the years with insights on how they intersect with the fab world. It was probably a bit crammed - I had timed it to fit the 10-minute slot, but decided on a whim to add a couple of extra slides based on my first impressions of FAB25. The pace was then a bit broken, and I partly improvised. What follows is a reinterpreted version.
Who is FF?
I am a relative newcomer to the fab context, but not to community-oriented uses of digital technologies. Still, it may be good to start with a short introduction. Felipe, a.k.a. FF or "efe efe". I come from Brazil, and most of my work until 2019 was based there, while frequently cooperating internationally. In 2020, I moved to Berlin, where I still live nowadays. Being as brief as possible here, I've been active since the early 2000s in fields like:
- community informatics and digital inclusion
- digital culture, creative commons, open-source culture and technology
- critical making, hacklabs, and makerspaces
- e-waste, reuse, inclusive circularity
- arts + tech labs
- citizen and open science
- participatory design research
MetaReciclagem and more
Through the decades working in these fields, I collected hundreds of stories. For instance, in 2002 I was a co-founder of MetaReciclagem, an open network setting up labs to refurbish computers discarded and donated by diverse actors. We'd set up “computer rooms” or “telecentres” in community associations, cultural centres, and schools. For historical context, about 20 years ago we set up what was probably the first open Wi-Fi access point in a park in Brazil - and that was before any of us even had personal Wi-Fi devices. It may be hard for newer generations, but at that time, the Internet was only available through bulky computers and cable connections. You would typically use it sitting on a chair. Wireless connectivity was a dream, something we craved. The idea of truly functional mobile Internet sounded like something out of science fiction.
My formative years were around the turn of the century and the early 2000s - when we were on the left were the ones against globalisation and proposing to break with mainstream politics. Another world should be possible, as we tried to articulate on the World Social Forum. The Internet was growing and looked promising. We were finally able to have our own media. And yes, I started my adult life as a blogger, so open documentation was always at the centre of most of what I've done over these decades. Some samples can still be found on my current website. A good part of it is naturally in Portuguese, but nowadays that's less of an obstacle than it used to be in the past.
For now, suffice to say that things I learned since those early times kept coming back in most of my following projects. I can try to define my field of work as an open-source, open-ended approach to commons-oriented community engagement grounded on the hands-on critical appropriation of technologies and materials. And I reckon all of those topics are familiar and relevant to the fab movement.
Two Neils
Ahead of my talk at FAB25, I already planned to mention the famous TED Talk given by Neil Gershenfeld in 2006. But his opening session in Brno made me add a slight diversion. So, before I return to the 2006 Neil, please allow me to refer to the 2025 one, particularly on two issues:
- a seeming contradiction between diversity and non-diversity: people from everywhere, who nonetheless share a common trait: the drive to promote change [and, I might add, a similar vocabulary on how to pursue that].
- the present goal of scaling impact instead of merely counting the number of labs installed across the continents.
My way of framing my own talk and workshop for FAB25 could arguably relate to both of those considerations. First though, I must add that to my individual sensibility there was not enough diversity at FAB25. And I'm not even talking about skin color, accent, or gender spectrum - all of which felt narrower than I'd expect on an international conference in 2025. For the purposes of this text, I'm more interested in the diversity of vocabularies of change. In particular, I still hear an excessive focus on fabrication, machines, and occasionally sensors. And insufficient discussion about the reuse of goods and materials.
Obviously, one could say, it's the FAB conference, why wouldn't people be discussing... fabrication?. And that might be precisely the point of my talk. I see fabrication as necessary and full of potential, but not the ultimate solution for every problem in the world. And being among so many dedicated and purpose-oriented people in Czechia reinforced the sensation that a lot of talent is being wasted on misguided cookie-cutter techno-solutionism. And I'm surely not a fan of waste - either as a noun or a verb.
I'm not saying that reuse-oriented manufacturing was completely out of the field of vision. On the days following my talk, I saw a considerable number of discussions and concrete examples of material circularity incorporated into the fab world. But here again I return to the point made above: the way the community constructs its public narrative influences how the world outside perceives the fab movement and what it is about. And still today, 3D printers melting filament are the most common image associated with makerspaces and Fab Labs among laypersons.
Further, a superficial mention of the circular economy can be equally problematic. On its mainstream forms, the CE often carries the same kinds of biases I was hinting at above: techno-solutionism, displacement of experienced stakeholders due to the uncritical adoption of top-down initiatives, and the resulting disconnection between potentiality and real needs (on this, see for instance the excellent book Circular Economy and the Global South).
Now to Gershenfeld's idea of scaling impact instead of merely multiplying labs and equipment. That's another valid and crucial point. But here again I'd like to go a bit deeper on the idea of impact itself. Of course, I am aware of the many interesting initiatives of social innovation that adopt that term. Impact investment, impact entrepreneurship, and so on. But even those projects may be based on problematic assumptions.
The first such assumption is a clear separation between change agents and the groups to be impacted - or to use another questionable term, their “target group”. Such sense of explicit otherness may lead to prejudice and induce exploitative and/or biased configurations. Impact, after all, can often be violent - that is, by violating the integrity of those who suffer it.
An attentive eye can see that happening when the supposed change-maker thinks they understand the problem better than the community can. In many cases, that may even be true. An outsider's view is often useful, especially a systemic one deeply informed by other realities and experiences. On the other hand, it can just as much result in a superficial assessment of what the problems are - think of the law of the instrument: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail”.
One could say that in those cases, grounded arguments would be able to counterbalance superficial views. But such situations frequently give rise to delicate power dynamics, particularly when the outsider is backed by external funding, has formal institutional recognition, or is the only technologically savvy person in the conversation. Such imbalances add pressure to the exchange and will frequently tilt decision-making away from the real needs of local communities. To mitigate such undesired effects, perhaps we should aim not at impacting communities, but rather embracing and caring for them.
All that leads me back to the 2006 Neil. This video was watched almost a million times on the TED website alone - and we can suppose thousands more on other platforms too. It was an important seed for what the fab movement has become. In addition to stating that “the digital revolution is over, and we have won”, he brought other essential points then. And honestly, it disappoints me to see that many members of fab communities seem to have missed a crucial part. I mean this one:
“The message coming from the Fab Labs is that the other five billion people on the planet aren't just technical sinks; they're sources.”
To this point, many fab projects do aim at impacting those “billions”. They are the groups of people outside the fab bubble. Sometimes they are called “local community”. However, when these groups are at best the target of actions designed without their participation, they are indeed sinks. In those cases, innovations coming from fabs only flow in one direction. And that seems to be their only role - nothing but a receptacle of things and ideas designed and planned elsewhere, occasionally contributing with data. Surely, the fab movement can sport cases in which communities are treated as true sources, but even then, they possess unequal decision-making power. And I argue that this is not enough. Those groups of people lying outside the fab context should be more than sources. I see them as… people. Who can, naturally, take diverse roles:
- agents
- creators
- field experts
- reality-checkers
- red teamers
- co-designers
But essentially, people. Humans going about with their lives and quite aware of what their living conditions and problems are. And that is crucial if we want to address Gershenfeld's other point from that talk:
The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems".
Nobody in the fab community would disagree that solutions - when solutions are even relevant, but let's leave that discussion for another text - should be designed and produced locally. However, what we often see in Fab Labs is the cookie-cutter mentality. Projects that try to replicate in their surrounding communities solutions that were created elsewhere, regardless of completely different cultures, sociopolitical reality, and concrete material conditions. I attribute that to a quite limited understanding of what a community is.
Commonalities and differences
A community, in my view, is not an easily definable and homogeneous entity facing clear problems, the solutions to which are already present somewhere else. This perspective often supposes that members of the community only lack sufficient knowledge, creativity, or even the drive to change things. In my experience, that is rarely the case. Any community is a unique combination of multiple identities and commonalities. Such commonalities may range from geographical location, interests, demographic characteristics such as gender, ethnic background or age group, to being affected by external conditions, threats, or changes. Just as importantly, though, communities are equally constituted of differences. Here there's an intentional choice of words: diversity and difference are not the same. I apologise in advance for quoting my own writing here:
Diversity has long been recognised as essential in creative and innovative processes, including design and technology development (Page, 2008). With an array of different perspectives, ideas, and approaches, a diverse team can significantly enhance problem-solving capabilities and innovation (Phillips, 2014). On the other hand, a superficial understanding of diversity may result in significant pitfalls, including ‘tokenism’ and stereotyping, to the extent that organisations might occasionally seek only to appear diverse without truly incorporating diverse perspectives in their decision-making processes (Kulik, 2014).
The term ‘difference’ is then crucial to understand community-making. It can be seen as the range of attributes an individual possesses that makes them unique or distinct from others in a group, which can contribute to identity and diversity (Page, 2008). If there is no community without commonalities, it is also true that without difference there is no real need for a community. After all, if everyone thinks and knows the same (an impossibility in itself in a Freirean perspective, but let’s entertain the idea), there is no room for exchanging information, perspectives or opinions.
Think of a community you feel part of: would it be at all significant if every member had the same opinion about everything? Would it feel like a true and healthy community?
One of the authors I most repeatedly quote in my texts is the Spanish scholar Antonio Lafuente, whose work on the concept of common science has inspired many of my projects. Lafuente discusses the idea of affected communities as central to any honest attempt to generate knowledge and technology that truly addresses real people's problems instead of only partially working around the usual biases of scientists and technologists. If we are to promote transformative positive change (be it by scaling impact or more nuanced formulations), affected communities should be involved from the start. I'd also add that communities should indeed have the right to even refuse innovations, when they find them irrelevant or to be driving attention away from real issues.
Reinforcing the point about externally-oriented agents and locally-rooted network weavers, another of my often-cited authors, John Thackara, recently wrote the following commented on a LinkedIn post:
“After 40 years as a (self-appointed) weaver myself, I've learned that 95% of the most effective weavers are already out there - but using other names: carer, neighbour, host, farmer, librarian, colleague, friend. They are individuals, in unique places. How do we provide practical solidarity and care to them?”
That's not to say that the fab world should simply try to serve those needs already identified by local communities. The best boss I had in my entire career, former Brazilian Ministry of Culture and award-winning musician Gilberto Gil, sang that “the people know what they want, but the people also want what they don't know“.
To achieve that in communities, we need true dialogue - with respect for embodied and situated knowledge, as well as awareness and mitigation of embedded privilege, biases, and power imbalances. And crucially, an anti-racist, feminist, and anti-colonial stance. We need to navigate through the tension between commonalities and differences, and engage in new world creation and deeper modes of collaboration. That's what I've been trying to do for more than two decades. Let's get back to a bit of storytelling now.
Connecting, reflecting, and wandering
As already mentioned, I was one of the founders of the MetaReciclagem network in Brazil, 22+ years ago. MetaReciclagem grew through what we called spores: loosely connected autonomous labs. Each spore was rather idiosyncratic and deeply adapted to its local context. There was no requirement for a common overall methodology, setup, or approach other than following three basic principles:
- promoting the critical appropriation of digital technologies;
- using and developing open technologies, methods, and culture;
- documenting activities, findings, and insights using a shared online infrastructure - most of the time, that meant an email group and a wiki, or wiki-inspired, website.
Building and maintaining that network taught all of us quite a lot about commons-oriented takes on technological appropriation, tactical creativity, and vernacular innovation in Brazilian cultures. I would go on investigating and building initiatives on those fields. Project websites from those times are still around - also mainly in Portuguese. Here are some of them, if anyone is interested:
- The archived MetaReciclagem website.
- Mutirão da Gambiarra, a collaborative editorial collective discovering and documenting MetaReciclagem actions.
- The advocacy group Lixo Eletrônico (Internet Archive copy), contributing to the inclusion of EEE in the Brazilian Solid Waste legislation.
- Desvio, an experimental lab about electronic arts and waste.
- The Brazilian Digital Culture strategy (Internet Archive copy), implemented chiefly through the Pontos de Cultura program.
- Repair Culture, a design residency in Qatar.
- TransforMatéria, an open investigation on the contact points between repair, recycling, digital making, and traditional craft - including a design residency in France and a research visit in Germany.
Those experiences would later be instrumental in writing my doctoral thesis titled "Generous cities", wherein I discuss the reuse of materials through community-based practices of repair, upcycling, re-circulation and re-purposing. More recently, I also started an experimental research diary called "Future Beyond Repair".
Through all these years, I have collected stories. Hundreds of them, perhaps more. And I'd like to mention one of particular relevance to the framing of this text. Let's then travel to a special place in my home country.
Ubatuba
Photo CC-BY-SA Bruno Amir / Wikimedia Commons
This is Ubatuba. An amazing place in the south-east of Brazil. It's situated where our Atlantic Coast is crossed by the Tropic of Capricorn. It has almost 100 beaches, waterfalls, communities of indigenous, quilombola and fishing cultures, and a high proportion of preserved Atlantic Rainforest. The population is a little over 100,000 for most of the year, and in the summer it grows manifold due to holidaying.
I love that place. Lived there for 11 happy years. I love the place, I must say, even being fully aware that it is not a complete idyllic paradise - despite what a clever photo selection might suggest. Ubatuba suffers the effects of contemporary contradictions just as much as any other place on earth. Social inequality, political polarisation, climate fatigue, mindless consumerism, hyper-individualism and its consequences. The seemingly inevitable battle between growth and sustainability. Dominant classes with little regard for the real needs of the people. Contemporary condition, no less. Oh, and of course, waste.
During the time I lived there, I tried to do my part. Most of the time as a volunteer, sometimes investing my time and money, occasionally making enough to cover costs. I set up an experimental lab, founded a nonprofit co-working space, helped a community radio digitise their operation. I founded and organised four editions of an international festival on arts, science and technology. I taught computer maintenance to 15-year-olds at a local technical school. I was elected as representative of digital and urban cultures on the local Advisory Board for Cultural Policy, and almost succeeded in creating a similar policy board for Science and Technology. I pitched for a participatory action research project on open and collaborative science with a well-reputed research institute, got the project and co-led it.
More importantly, though, I was always seeking ways to engage, learn with, and support grassroots and community-based organisations. I wanted my experience, networks, and skills to be useful in changing local reality for the better.
Ubatuba is indeed a natural haven, as you can seen in this image generated on DataGeo. The light green area shows the proportion of preserved areas in the territory: upwards of 80%. One of the structural conditions for the existence of its largely preserved areas - very rare amid the Atlantic Forest otherwise destroyed through centuries of colonial extraction - are its environmental Conservation Units. The municipality has parts of a state park, a national park, and a marine preservation area. And that is not a coincidence. Rather, it results from political organisation, popular education, and grounded activism.
Affected communities have been able to slow down and sometimes block completely the plans of those people with money and power always trying either to transform lush forest into concrete and asphalt (paraphrasing my friend Juan Prada) - or to fence off the attractive places and allow them only to be used by themselves and their guests. Resulting from the side effects of a global economic system based on excess and wastefulness, some decades ago the local landfill in Ubatuba exhausted its capacity. And the environmental regulations made it impractical to license new landfills. Thankfully, in some senses; but also problematic in others.
Since then, Ubatuba has had to spend a significant part of its monthly budget to collect the solid waste generated in the territory, and transport it about 150 km uphill to be incinerated in another city. All that means that, on any given day, a number of garbage trucks spread lots of diesel smoke, oil stains, and leave the reek of decomposing matter along the otherwise beautiful, forest-surrounded sinuous roads.
These are Coco e Cia, a recycling cooperative led by black women, operating in a marginalised neighbourhood of Ubatuba. Coco provides decent and fair work for vulnerable people. Just as importantly, they help mitigate one of the worst and more widespread consequences of global capitalism: the growing mountains of waste produced every single day.
This makes the work of Gilda, Simone, Josi, and the cooperative members even more valuable. After all, they are significantly reducing the load of trash to be incinerated uphill and diverting it to recycling facilities. You'd think that the municipality would be happy to work with them. But of course things are not always that smooth. After all, they are a democratically run coop, politically organised, well networked, and doing the right things. If Coco was a profit-oriented private company whose owners were part of the local elites and had no problem exploiting their workforce, things would probably be easier, but that's not the point here. Thankfully, they are members of the National Waste Pickers' Movement (MNCR), which is quite active politically in Brazil. Each small victory Coco has is the result of alliances, negotiations, and struggle.
Even living abroad for some years now, every time I visit Brazil I pay them a visit. I learnt a lot from the coop and its leadership. One of the first such lessons happened before I left Ubatuba, likely in 2018. I had then the opportunity to appoint one organisation to receive a small grant (USD 5,000) from an international foundation. No strings attached. I chose Coco, and suggested Gilda that they could use the money to build a Precious Plastic workshop. I would volunteer my time and bring my geek friends to get it up and running. And certainly, the unbalanced leverage of privilege running in the background was precisely the mechanism I criticised above.
Fortunately, their response was gentle but clear. “Thanks, Felipe, but to be honest what we need now is to renovate the roof to allow the expansion of our sorting area”. And they were right, of course. Given the sheer volume of materials that Coco needs to process every day, it made no sense to invest the little unassigned funds they had into building a gimmick that would only scratch the surface and be practically useless to solve their challenges. They got the 5k, built the roof, and kept growing. Nowadays they have their own trucks, a formal contract with the municipality, and are mentoring groups in other cities into creating their own coops. A good part of their success comes from their commitment to do what they know they need, not what a well-intentioned middle-class white man with friends abroad (that would be me) thought would be cool. If it wasn't for my personal relationship and admiration for them and the fact that they are so conscious of their needs, things could have turned different.
The short story about Coco and my reflections about it may sound obvious to many of you reading this text. But is it really? How many times have we seen external agents - even unintentionally - distort the needs of local groups, seeking their own fulfilment and appeasing their individual satisfaction or international connections? That's my response to the discussion about sinks, sources, and agents. Basically: invite people to help shape projects, but make sure to give them enough space to question everything. Everything. They are the field experts and ultimate stakeholders, and will likely be there after you leave.
A globally distributed local problem
Now let's get zoom back out to a broader view. If the fab movement is to develop local solutions to local problems, here's a slightly refined question: how to explore local solutions to globally distributed local problems? And here I mean, of course, the issue of waste. Addressing it would certainly benefit from more truly grounded social-environmental innovation combined with state-of-the-art technologies.
The material origins of waste can easily be traced by following in reverse the international path of industrial supply chains. However, its effects are at everyone's doorstep. In other words, I sure wish manufacturers were held responsible for solving the problem that they generate - and I hope in the future they will. I live in Europe, and strongly support the policy developments in that direction. The European Waste Framework and the Circular Economy Action Plan. EU directives on Ecodesign and the Right to Repair. Growing awareness about the ill effects of fast fashion, and measures to mitigate it. All of those are necessary. They point to a better situation. However, the effects of those developments are projected for decades into the future.
Video CC Tom Fisk / Pexels
On this day and age, a global industry-oriented economy produces too much. Society discards too much. Everywhere. Any honest attempt at addressing this globally distributed local condition needs to aim at reducing the volume of things that end up in the waste stream every day. And just as the path towards more sustainable manufacturing practices is being built, we must simultaneously create ways to enable local communities to seize today the potential value of things discarded or kept out of use. Yes, that includes that drawer full of stuff that you'll sort through next month - or the month after that, or next spring, maybe.
There surely is room for significant innovation here, adopting quite approaches. Better collection and sorting. Improved recycling processes. Smart procurement. Tracking the material provenance and destination of goods to ensure compliance with regulations. Educational campaigns. Incentive systems that reward sustainable behaviour. Investment in waste prevention and material reuse is proven to generate better societal outcomes than sorting, collecting, or recycling. And there are significant benefits - beyond economic ones - of adopting commons-based approaches for material reuse at the local and community level.
Presently, my humble contribution to the discussion relate to the knowledge and skills needed to increase the reuse of materials. I always find useful to think of cities and towns as large-scale makerspaces: practically every human settlement - from the smallest of villages to the largest megacity - has facilities and workshops with machines and equipment, skilled and experienced people, and varied amounts of materials waiting to be put into use. The people in many of those facilities are largely unaware of fab labs and makerspaces, and talking to them may be hard at times in terms of vocabulary, worldview, and expectations. But while I do see how reassuring it is to find a global community of like-minded people in events like the FAB Conferences, my argument is that promoting effective and caring positive change in the world requires more. Willing changemakers need to embrace the idea of engaging with real people who think and act in ways radically different from theirs.
Arguably, most problems in the world do not require a Fab Lab. What they do require, though, is people skilled in distributed and engaged innovative thinking, deep creative experimentation, adaptive systemic interventions, and material ingenuity. And I am sure - even more so after the conference in Czechia - that Fab Labs and makerspaces are full of that kind of people. If they are able to establish true dialogue with communities, we have a good start.
Reuse Academy
How can we design local systems to promote a greater reuse of goods and materials in cities and regions? I've been exploring this question through diverse approaches over the years. It certainly requires simultaneous strategies on multiple fields: infrastructure and logistics, tax and rewards, legislation and policy, culture and behaviour. To the point of what we've been discussing in this text: can the ability to assess, repair, transform, and adapt materials already present in cities and regions serve the goal of material reuse? And if so, where to start?
There are currently no manuals for this kind of plan. And it's not only about transferring and translating industrial best practices to a distributed scenario as often is the case in Fab Labs. The best practices of a wasting industry are indeed wasteful. Even specialised actors of waste management frequently discard goods and materials that would still possess value if they were seen differently, moved to another context, or slightly transformed by way of repairs or repurposing. What we need is to combine the excellent engineering and material skills developed by the industry over the decades with the cultural embeddedness, environmental sensibility and social awareness of experimental initiatives by collectives and communities. Not to mention, of course, economic incentives and reward systems that ensure feasible change.
Here comes another part of the half-joking naming of this project and my talk at FAB25: Reuse Academy. As mentioned, one of the structural elements of the fab movement is the Fab Academy - an intensive educational programme teaching students how to design, prototype and manufacture things. I would surely like similar initiatives that would focus more on the reuse, repurposing, and upcycling of available materials. The name Reuse Academy is not meant as a simple critique, though, nor does it propose in any way to replace the Fab Academy. It is equally inspired by more recent branches of the Fab movement such as Fabricademy, BioAcademy and other modules in the emerging Academany.
There are many potential starting points to build the Reuse Academy. My mind is initially set on those types of organisations already engaged in waste prevention, but not always heard in strategic discussions. Zero waste projects, experimental and inclusive circular economy initiatives, creatives and entrepreneurs working on upcycling and remanufacturing, repair cafes and open workshops. There certainly is an important role for those few waste agencies with eyes on tactical interventions that help reduce the very need to handle discarded materials by creating reuse centres. But what I found, after visiting and interviewing some of these spaces and people, is that there is currently no structured educational offer that covers all aspects of such a complex topic: systemic, material, social, and environmental. Part of the problem is that some of these centres are created and run by managers who have worked for decades in the recycling industry and don't question its deep ties with a wasteful capitalist worldview.
The answer, in my opinion, needs to start by listening to people who are cognisant of the material and economic aspects of material reuse, while being at the same time socially aware and politically active on the side of communities. I'm not saying we should disregard for-profit businesses to design solutions. But those actors have so far been over-represented, and for complementary solutions to be created, we should include those actors with deeper ties with affected communities and embodied local experts such as Coco e Cia. Locally designed solutions for globally distributed local problems.
Apart from setting up reuse centres and training their staff, of course, I'm also interested in creating novel approaches for regenerative strategies to handle excess materials. A couple of months ago, Jay Cousins and Jeff Emmett held a workshop in Berlin on “Forest Economics”. One image that stuck with me was their description of one of the main differences between us humans and mycelia: while we take nutrients in to digest them internally, mushrooms move around them and digest externally, so to say. A plan for local material reuse would arguably benefit from a similar take: instead of relying only on centralised infrastructure to receive, process, and output stuff, how about enabling neighbourhood associations, local entrepreneurs, community coops and other deeply embedded agents to sort the available materials and use them to benefit their local economies?
The final question of this rather long text is: do we need Fab Labs to create reuse strategies for every city, town, and region? Not necessarily. But can such strategies be more effective by having purposeful and well-trained change agents who respect and embrace local realities? Definitely. There may even be a place for digital fabrication, in the context of providing local contexts with the capacity for situated reuse-oriented making.
Next steps
If you read this far (or if you skipped the text and jumped straight here, I don't mind), take this as an invitation. Let's experiment and create these realities together. And while we're at it:
- If you are already involved with any kind of material reuse initiative, please help our project on the material valuer curriculum by filling out this survey. It's fast, most questions are optional, and it would be great to have your take on it.
- I'm available to discuss these and other topics - here's my LinkedIn profile, and a zcal to book calls.
- For more on repair, reuse and upcycling and multiple other versions of most of my arguments above, check the Reuse City wiki.
This text was also published on LinkedIn.