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Fig: 1 – War damage in Syria - Credits

Constructional waste through war

The image of the destroyed cities in the past decades is hollow, it is consisting of components to form it which have different echoes that tell stories about the crisis and social context, such areas are dark merging series of incidents as sunlight creates quite shadows on the rubble accumulated reflecting a new hope and inspiration, ancient city rubbles have different stories to tell rather than modern cities rubble each with different echoes and means.

Recently the interest in re-activating these rubbles are wildly spread in terms of recycling, new interventions of material use, and smart technologies to activate them.

The reuse of constructional waste is a global issue in the crisis situation, however, the nostalgic value churned out of such friction depicts a new way to see and build value out of this constructional waste.

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Fig: 2 – An article by the economist on how long it will take to clean out the Rubble - Source

Rubble problem

While it’s true, the damage from the war can sometimes be so huge, it can’t be determined how to even start rebuilding again. And before even, we rebuild the huge rubble problem stands as a piece of inseparable baggage that can only be solved by dumping somewhere else.

The design challenge calls for an initiative in new post-war cities, developing product ideas that can form and transport social & cultural vision as well as the real texture from the spot of crisis that makes you imagine, think, and also hear the echo of this rubble.

We are looking for new industrial design ideas that can be created from it, as an integral design process that combines intense conceptualization, computation, post-war materials, modern materials & rapid prototyping, which give a new dimension to the rubble problem.

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Fig: 3 – Rebuilding endeavours have already begun everywhere in Syria – How can we contribute?

Brief

The design challenge is to conceive new product design interventions resulting in more like a speaking product reflecting the roughness of post-war materials and the echoes of its culture, that delivers the society a message.

Physical & conceptual exploration of continuous products that come out of rubble such as (furniture, jewellery, decorative plasters, light products, sculpture, etc.), through the use of manually designed / computational-generated forms and color gradients.

A challenge to design an exclusive structural form product that can simulate the events closely in a unique and expressive way.
Create a scalable framework of these products so that it can be replicable despite the variability in the rubble obtained from post-war sites around the world. The possibilities are many but participants are advised to stick only 1 kind of product from above or of their choice.

Method

Rubble Type: There are plenty of pictures available on the web – you can choose any of the post-war redevelopment cities and pick a type of rubble you want to play with.
Product Line: Understand the material property and product line that can be conceived from that material – What all other materials and processes will be needed to produce the item?
Iterations: Developing iterations of the same product to understand manufacturability, scalability, and the theme embedded in it.
Final Outcome: How well the entire process deliver the echo described in the brief – with a viable design pitch?

The scale of the product design

There’s practically no limit to what can be a mix and match of materials and items while making this range of products. We understand considering packaging, the structure of the product or the manufacturing process may involve modern machinery or even new raw materials.

However principally please ensure that at least 50% of the product is from sourced materials from the theme-related spaces.

(Example: http://uni.xyz/projects/frozen-mountain-desc-frozen-mountain-con - This project shares the story of mountains of Hong Kong – where we are constantly overriding the relationships between humans and nature through excessive construction).

The product size without packaging or dis-assembled should be not more than 50cm x 40cm x 40cm – LxBxH

Echo of Rubble

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