Circular Economy: Material Flows and Sustainable Materials – Practical Applications

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

4.20

Sustainable Alternatives Time Machine: Finding Inspiration and Solutions from History

This week’s assignment aims to connect all the different examples during part 4 – organic cotton, hemp, wool, fungi, algae, grasses, trees, earth – to a larger societal and historical context. Building upon time travel in popular culture like the Swedish TV Christmas calendar ‘Tidstjuven’ (the Time Thief) and a long list of movies, it’s now time to step into Sustainable Alternatives Time Machine.

The Sustainable Alternatives Time Machine

This assignment relies on your own imagination and partly on your own interest and knowledge of history, specifically the history of a specific place at a specific time. The aim is to look at sustainable alternatives to current material use, production, and waste generation, trying to find materials, practices, and societal solutions to meet basic human needs and higher aspirations.

Here’s a list of questions to guide your journey and exploration:

If you could go back in time to one specific place, time and/or a relevant historical event (to observe, not to intervene) – When and where would you?
Why that time and place?
What do you see? How are people living, relating to each other and the surrounding environment?
Which materials, products, and constructions are used to meet different levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (see illustration below)?
Where does the waste and garbage from those products and processes end up? How much is reused, repaired, or made into something useful?

Write down what you see, make sketches, drawings, take photos and video (using AI), and document your visit to another time, and what you have learned.

Diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (five-level model). Based on his original 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” and later clarifications. CC BY-SA 4.0.

« Previous