Creative upcycling: Reconnecting people, materials and place through making

Abstract

Short 'product lives' and disposable packaging result in premature disposal of valuable resources. Industrialisation, mass production and global supply chains have resulted in a disconnect between people, places, materials and design. Upcycling is reuse of discarded materials which results in an increase in 'value'. We discuss the potential for creative upcycling to reconnect people with materials and establish cultures and communities of making. The reaction of the public to creative reuse is explored by creating a café structure made entirely from recycled materials, and this provides the starting point to consider the contexts in which upcycling occurs, the motivations for (and barriers to) reuse and upcycling, the potential benefits of upcycling in the context of affluent Western 'consumer' societies, and the scope for designers to imbue objects with the potential for creative reuse. We argue that designing to enable creative upcycling allows the future lives of objects to be contingent on context and culture, rather than being prescribed by the designer, with potential for widespread social, economic and environmental benefits.

Understanding Family Collaboration Around Lightweight Modification of Everyday Objects in the Home

“…Prior work called attention to questions around "how to imbue an object with potential for imaginitive reuse by individuals" [12]. We find that families already employ coordination patterns that could enable collaborative creativity by building off one another's ideas and experimenting with alternative roles.…”

Developing Interventions for Scaling Up UK Upcycling

“…Overall, the findings on approaches to and the context for upcycling corroborated past study results from the areas of upcycling, sustainable consumer behaviour, sustainable fashion, craft and the maker movement, suggesting that UK citizens' approaches to and the context for upcycling could be broadly understood within these areas. As common upcycling materials, wood, furniture, metal, electronics, fabrics and (plastic) packaging as revealed in our study (Section 3.1.1) have been addressed in other existing studies, with wood and fabrics appearing most frequently [22,71,108,[114][115][116]. Online shops or networks such as eBay, Gumtree, Freecycle or Freegle as frequently used source of materials (Section 3.1.1) have been described as useful sites for buying and selling (or disposing and sourcing for free) used materials, typically in households [22,108,117,118] or fashion industries [39,119,120].…”

Encouraging Sustainable Behaviour Change via a Social Practice Approach: A Focus on Apparel Consumption Practices

“…Aside from the many debates around what creativity is, Kara (2015, p. 12) argues that it predominantly involves "taking things that already exist and making new combinations" rather than creating something from scratch (e.g., re-making an item from deconstructing another apparel item as opposed to using a new piece of fabric to make an apparel item). Aligned with a sustainable approach to changing wasteful apparel approaches is the creative practice of upcycling, whereby garments are broken down into their component parts to redesign new products (Bridgens et al 2018; Cassidy and Han 2017). Upcycling is described as being different to recycling as materials and components of unwanted goods are not just re-used but are incorporated into new designs which go beyond resolving textile waste management challenges in that it is essentially a new way of thinking as well as a new way of working (Digital Universe 2011).…”