Cottage Industrial

This project is an exploration of the possibilities of in home recycling and plastic production as a way to take responsibility for our trash. I wanted to question why we site recycling and manufacturing of plastics far away from (some) of our homes and explore the possibilities of true ownership of consumption. I was inspired by Annika Frye’s Improvisation Machine and David Hakkens’ Precious Plastic project, taking the coopting of household appliances from Frye’s work and the miniaturized industrial processes as proof of concept from Hakkens. However, I was interested in the cultural implications of in home plastic production and so I created a character, the Rustic Individual, as a symbolic stand in for a potential market. In my investigation of this concept I built a prototype vacuum former that was powered by a shop vac and modeled potential products that would result from in home recycling processes. Ultimately I found it most interesting to site and advertise an oven baked vacuum former and a stove top injection molder. I used images of Bay Area billboards from Wired magazine to advertise these prospective appliances and the collages attempt to ask the question of what ownership of plastic waste could look like in home, in the kitchen.