There is very little real invention. The story of design can be told through its references: a lineage of borrowed forms, quoted text, subtle homage and and not-so-subtle stealing. Trash tranforms objects though from a thing of value to no value, and from private posessions into public property. And from that position, you can take the object back.
Explore the quotes to the left. Hover to surface them, and use the buttons to filter them. Absorb the knowledge. Revive ideas that came before, and build upon them to create something new.
Consumer capitalism also depends on a fantasy of waste...that de-emphasizes the longevity of objects and the material problem of garbage.
—Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.
—Italo Calvino
A website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished. It’s imperfect—maybe sometimes it even has a few bugs. But that’s the beauty of it. Websites are living, temporal spaces.
—Laurel Schwulst
Participatory design work, if done well, can be fundamentally democratic, giving ordinary people a voice and an opportunity to influence outcomes.
—Jennie Winhall
Durability is the ability to have longevity in a world in constant flux, characterized by future permutations that no one can predict.
—Alina Wheeler
Garbage can only be generated on the scale it is today because we don't have time for an extended relationship with the stuff of our daily life.
—Robin Nagle
The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
—Mierle Laderman Ukeles
We will no longer be persuaded that to be better off, we must consume more trashy products and devices.
—John Thackara
Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness.
—Leonard Koren
Better now, perhaps, to see brand identity as working only by association, as a vessel onto which people can project their own opinions. One that remains open enough to carry an array of points of view and in turn mean something slightly different to everyone.
—Nick Bell
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part of it is nascent.
—John Ruskin
Code never seeks perfection and is in a constant state of iteration. Coders are also generally not afraid of sharing their incomplete, imperfect code openly.
—Shekhar Gurav
Maybe the most important thing we can do is figure out a way to use the style of graphic design to make the new environmentalism more than just a style.
—Karrie Jacobs
So if waste is this book’s object, its real subjects are desire and time, because the things we call our waste exist in an interzone between two states of mind and two structures of feeling.
—Brian Thill
The task is to ‘create a real sense of emergency.’ Can art, literature, or architecture do that?
—Malcolm Miles
Sustainability, it must be acknowledged, is not a destination, but a journey. At what point do we want to ‘sustain’ — at a point of depletion or abundance?
—Wendy Jedlička, Jeremy Faludi, Pete Markiewicz, Tim Frick, Mark McCahill
Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction.
—Hito Steyerl
Who gains by this construction of reality, by this representation of this condition as ‘natural’?
—Rick Poynor
You have to throw the French fries container away. No one knows what else to do with it since, sadly, it was made that way, made to defeat the very knowledge that designed and manufactured it.
—Brian Allen
Trash can document the world as it is, but it can also open up a space for thinking in unabashedly utopian terms about the world as it might be.
—Tina Kendall