Up-cycling is a “responsible” design approach in which designers seek to put discarded
consumer products, such as bottles, to new and valuable uses, such as making lampshades.
Since that approach involves finding new functions for extant manufactured forms, upcycled
products
appear
to
be
typical
of other products created as a result of both designers
and users adapting extant forms to serve entirely different functions. This form-adaptive
approach appears to reverse the causal direction implied by Louis Sullivan's famous
dictum "form ever follows function". This paper then reviews antecedents of the up-cycling
approach historically, in order to critically examine the form-function relationship in
selected examples of engineering, weapon and consumer product design.
The example of the Venturi tube shows that it can form a component of products with
functions as different as wind instruments, carburettors and jet pumps. Although the
Venturi effect can only be created by a tube of very specific form, the functions it performs
can be very different. Furthermore it is shown that the Venturi effect can be created without
use of a Venturi tube, by means of adapting the extant parts of a gas turbine to create a
novel secondary compressor.
The same form-adaptive approach can be found in primitive tools which evolved into
weapons such as the mace and the billhook. Ceremonial versions of the mace show that the
communication of ideas is a crucial function of many designs. Since beliefs and values
change over time, communicative functions are not temporally fixed. It is argued that the
primary function of many up-cycled products is to comment positively on sustainability
issues by demonstrating how consumer waste can be transformed into something far more
valuable by creative virtuosity. Consequently, up-cycled designs appear to function less
successfully in helping to physically manage post-consumer wastes.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
