Found Objects
Detailed Description
Project Details
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the OPENNESS value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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Fiction Factory is a construction company based in Amsterdam which produces custom made B2B interiors from a diverse range of materials. For the past five years, the factory has focused on production with circular engineering principles. However, even with these principles in place, the production they execute creates a lot of waste: 78% of this waste is wood, and most of this wood waste is created by digital production on Fiction Factory’s CNC machines.
Like many other production facilities, the use of CNC routers at Fiction Factory allows for the production of highly custom interiors with fast turnaround times. However, because the types of projects and engineered parts are constantly changing, it is not possible to fully optimise the material use. In general, an average of 30% of sheet material processed by CNC ends up as waste. For Fiction Factory, this means that they throw away an equivalent of 2000 sheets of new material every year.
Driven to fight the wood waste battle, Fiction Factory joined the Better Factory program (funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 initiative), facilitating a multi-stakeholder collaboration, which sparked the idea to create Found Objects.
Found Objects is an open source tool that transforms this wood-waste into a new building material. It creates unique pieces from the leftovers. Each component is generated to fill in unused space before production begins. This means that while the exact shape of each part is determined by whatever is being produced, the dimensions and general forms generated can be controlled: from organic and curvy to angular and geometric.
Through an open and collaborative approach, the Found Objects team has successfully developed circular alternatives that are beneficial for both humans and nature. The openness is emphasized to underscore the profound impact of open-source innovation in a critical context where quick action is essential to address global issues effectively.
Found Objects - github repository: https://github.com/found-objects/FoundObjects
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the COLLABORATIVE value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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Collaboration has been the essential element driving the Found Objects project development from the very beginning. Since day one, a diverse group of individuals with a wide range of skills has joined the team, attracting various organizations to collaborate with the project in diverse ways.
To operate with a multidisciplinary and multicultural team, employs an holistic approach to problem-solving. To count with the support of Fiction Factory, has been useful for the team to foster close collaboration and trust with the industry.
Following the development of the Open-Source design tool, the Found Objects team (Jesse Howard, Micah Ijlst, jonathan lammerts Van Bueren, Vincent Mesker, Salomé Perez-Salas, Iñigo Puerta, Marije Remigius, Celina Van Zvijlen, Ricardo Van Leuwen, Paola Zanchetta) actively tested techniques to work with the new building material. Resulting in creating meaningful products to engage consumers, fostering an increased awareness of regenerative practices.
These designs were showcased at various 2023 design fairs (Milano Design Week, SOUP Studio space in Rotterdam, GLUE Festival Amsterdam, Dutch Design Week). At these events, the Found Objects team set up a workspace, inviting emerging material-driven designers to spend a day experimenting with the pieces and contributing their perspectives to the techniques and aesthetics of working with Found Objects pieces. The purpose of contributing to the design fairs during the last year, has been to create a Found Objects community: by engaging and inspiring designers, makers, and creative minds toward new ways of crafting meaningful products from waste.
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the REGENERATIVE value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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Every design decision generates economic, social, and ecological changes on a planetary scale. The production of interior design and ephemeral architecture demands certain materials (like wood) which are the planet's finite resources. We believe that what we treat as waste today could be seen as a resource, and systematically become a new raw material tomorrow. With Found Objects, we are taking the first steps to give a use to this material, before even it becomes waste.
The commitment to re-design objects' lifecycles capable of reversing the effects of the industrial extractivist model, and to respond to material reality during the climate crisis by awakening customers' responsibility, is no longer an option but a necessity to face the collateral impacts of linear thinking. Found Objects is a project that breeds new ways of working, thinking, and valuing circular techniques, in order to produce technologies locally, which if distributed, will have a global impact of change for good.
- In your project's current stage of development, how does it align with the ECOSYSTEMIC value of the Distributed Design Platform?
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We live in a multi-crisis context and super-connected world, where the prevalent notion is that leftover materials are considered waste, leading to their incineration and subsequent environmental pollution (and many other systemic problems).
While the primary goal of the Found Objects project is to grow within Fiction Factory, empowering the designers directly involved and its broader community, the issue Found Objects tackles resonates broadly and transversely across the industry. The open-source design tool offers the possibility to parametrically work with Grasshopper, creating code operable with diverse digital fabrication machines, such as CNC routers, laser cutters, plotters, and more. Allowing the conditions to applying a circular approach to a diverse categories of materials: ranging from fabrics to composites and even stone.
Found Objects transcends being merely an open-source solution; it stands as a tool that cultivates the necessary conditions for both local and global industries to rethink their circles of influence. It serves as a catalyst to elevate consumer awareness and promote a paradigm shift from a waste-centric mindset to one centered around valuing resources.
The Found Objects project has been presented, and the potential systemic change this and other distributed design projects can create was discussed together at Pakhuis de Zwijger - Design for Impact and Living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHRjk6N1auQ
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