***THIS PROJECT WAS COMPLETED ON JULY 4TH, 2010. THE LIVE FEED RAN FOR 10 MONTHS.***
Squanderless.com is a family portrait using live data of domestic waste. It is a visual meditation on the objects and materials that pass through our lives each day.
Inspired by research on the subject, including Italo Calvino’s ‘La Poubelle Agréée,’ I created the site in September 2009 with the aim of posting daily photographs of individual items of trash. Each item has associated tags according to material, weight, user, function, and color. Users are able to literally sort through our trash. A motivated participant can produce specific results—for instance, who is the primary user of a specific material, what function is associated with the color yellow, what are the total number of items for a certain weight category. They may also choose to “show me” their own trash.
Squanderless is an ode to the object—offering a trace of its presence in our lives and the implied narrative. There is little text, simply images and tags—an online product catalog of consumed, rather than consumable, objects—begging the question, what is the emotional resonance of these things that surround us?
Tossing things in the trash is a fairly unconscious act. Squanderless offers pause. It captures an oft-forgot existence, in the form of raw data, as objects transition from purpose and value to detritus. Our private and domestic castoffs, once disposed, become part of the public waste stream handled by municipal workers. The point of departure is not just a key moment in the life-cycle of the object, it is the moment at which I relinquish personal ownership.
The site does what we all do every day: it transforms jettisoned artifacts from private to public property. I’m passing my family’s garbage to you virtually, just as it becomes yours quite literally. Squanderless is a portal, both online and off, between the inside and the outide, the private and the public.
A series of drawings entitled Future Fossils reimagines choice pieces of family garbage as future archaeological records. A second series, Topography, reveals the micro landscape of synthetic materials commonly found in domestic waste such as plastic wrap, foil, etc.
Squanderless is many things: design research, an art project, an amateur anthropological study and a portrait of domestic waste. During Phase 1, an initial one month study (July 20 – August 20, 2009), our family trash was sorted: noting weight, item description, function and household member of each article headed to the landfill. Compost and recycling was weighed as a daily total. In the spirit of science, the initial purpose was not to alter behavior but rather to conduct a simple quantitative study. And then to communicate the results in a visually compelling manner. The month’s trash was collected for the family portrait. The data exists in an Excel spreadsheet visualized via information design (click here for a simplified version of the data regarding weight). During this initial study, the concept for an online project, squanderless.com, was conceived. In this second phase, I chose to shift the focus from a quantitative study to a more qualitative, visual and community-based project.
As a graphic designer and faculty member of Pratt Institute’s Graduate Communications Design major, I feel an acute proximity to the making of stuff. In 2003, I spent 6 months at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UCSC learning about soil biology, organic farming and issues surrounding sustainability. During this period, I was amazed by the lack of garbage produced by a community of 50+ people, simply because the systems for input and output were in place to make it feasible to do so. Today, I live in a more conventional domestic setting and am the mother of two young children. On a daily basis, I am fascinated by the unyielding volume, as well as the nature and materials, of our domestic waste. In terms of affecting change regarding trash, I hope to discover design opportunities along the way.
Funding for this project provided in part by a Faculty Development Fund grant from Pratt Institute. Family portrait taken by photographer, Meredith Heuer. Programming for Squanderless.com by Teh-Kai Hong. You can find my website at jeanbrennan.com and my resume is attached here.
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