Stuff should last… you buy things to perform a function and they should do that for as long as possible… generations even! This is the aim of usethings designed products and the products we stock in usethings store.
Durability is one of the cornerstones of sustainable design. Design it to last. This reduces the number of products needed to perform a task over a life-time. This means less cumulative impacts from the making and disposal of all the products required for that task over that lifetime.
The next level of durability is to maintain, followed by repair, then for the creative, re-purposing (finding another function that uses the materials or engineering in an object).
This is where usethings tinker comes in.
Crap welding yes, but longer pot life
We use tinker in its traditional sense: an itinerant tinsmith, who mended household utensils. Well we are not itinerant but we will mend household items – repair, maintain, sharpen… bring it in and we’ll see what we can do. We’d also consider ‘hacks’ or re-purposing; tinker in the sense: fooling around with technology, there is some great engineering in products that is just too good to waste when only one bit has failed.
The pot above is made in durable stainless steel. It gets its ‘stainless’ (rust proof) qualities from the addition of chromium 6, one of the nastiest chemicals humans produce. If we had thrown this pot out when the handle fell off and got another one, that would mean more chromium 6 is used for the new pot and the impacts of making the first lot are no longer balanced by the item being in use.
usethings tinkering service – repair, maintain, sharpen… whatever it takes to keep it going. Make an appointment with Tim 0405 564 206 and bring your broken thing down to our store to discuss turning it back into a usething.
Some cultures, through need, can keep an object or product going for many years, or evolve it into something else useful. Unfortunately we don’t have the need – we just throw it out and go and buy another one.
Just as our resources are mined to bring us new products, tinkering mines these converted resources – failed then discarded products and materials. The stuff arrives here from all over the word, and is left here when it fails. We look to revive these things on a local scale for local needs with local skills. If it wasn’t for landfill we’d be knee deep in the stuff.
usethings propose the revival and elevation of ‘tinkering’ – some images below of repairs to articles that would have been discarded. In tinkering we’ve avoided buying another, solved a design problem with materials and process at hand – localising the revival of a product that may have consumed remote resources and energy to produce; certainly the end-of-life waste was destined to be local.
To tinker brings us longer product function, more skills, less waste, and less expense.
Below: broken workshop scissor handle glued and wired, loose joints in chair held together with a ‘Spanish windlass’.
usethings tinker also offers a splicing service… not really tinkering but another arcane skill we have that can create useful things. Spicing workshop coming to usethings store soon.
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