From new products to projects inspired by China and Russia and new business models, here is everything we’ve done in 2011.

Material Matters, a future furniture fair featured 20 companies, both real and imagined that respond to material scarcity in various ways. At our exhibition in Milan, many visitors applied with their business ideas.

Do you have ideas or are you already working on an innovative business model driven by material scarcity and overproduction of waste? You can still apply by sending an email to info@droog.com with subject line “Material Matters, the next fair”. We hope to gather enough businesses to host a real fair.

by Justin McGuirk

“[T]hey possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them.” – Georges Perec, Things

Part One

So I’m in Zurich, sitting in the office of Professor Lucas Bretschger, an economist. I ask him to give me a radical vision of the future, from an economics perspective that is. “People don’t normally ask me to be radical,” he replies, “I give policy advice, it’s all about small steps.” Just give it a try, I say. “What would be radical is to share world resources among all people, so that countries without oil could have a share, and all knowledge would be shared too.” Then he shrugs. “The only problem is that there is no world government.” And he smiles at me as if to say, “You see? Radical ideas won’t get you anywhere.”

In a way he’s right. There is no shortage of ideas. What we lack is the political will to override the vested interests. The green economy is a nice idea, but it won’t become a reality until we figure out how to make it more profitable than the ungreen economy. With Material Matters, Droog is manifesting another nice idea. What if we lowered income taxes and instead raised taxes on materials and waste? In a world of too much stuff and diminishing resources, raw materials would become more precious, which means we’d have to use them more cautiously. Meanwhile, we would no longer be able to throw things away with impunity – it would cost us. At a glance, you can see how this might solve the problem of the disposable goods economy, a world of hyper-consumption and hyper-waste.

Droog identifies a fundamental problem: a global economy reliant on steady growth presumes a world of infinite resources – economies may grow but the biosphere doesn’t. The economist Herman Daly puts it like this: “As the world becomes full of us and our stuff, it becomes empty of what was here before. To deal with this new pattern of scarcity, scientists need to develop a ‘full world’ economics to replace our traditional ‘empty world’ economics.”

In the Material Matters world, products would be more expensive, yes, but often more durable and easier to repair. We might start to rent more objects and reduce the number of things that we feel the need to own. Rather than owners, we might become stewards, looking after objects while they are in our possession, before shepherding them into other hands or, indeed, other forms. The need for material things would increasingly be by-passed as we seek out virtual pleasures and retail therapy as gaming experience. The new economy would polarise between the pixellated and the haptic – one an economy of quantity and the other of quality.

Is this too utopian? Wouldn’t there be social costs? Above all, doesn’t the free market have a habit of making a mockery of such paternalistic formulations?

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon made a bet with the ecologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich had been predicting that the population of the world was growing so fast that resources would become dangerously scarce, leading to massive price rises and a consequent deterioration in quality of life. Simon didn’t buy it. He wagered that if Ehrlich picked any five commodities, their prices would be lower in a decade’s time. His logic was that the market is so adaptable and human ingenuity so reliable that as soon as a commodity gets too expensive, we find alternatives. And when demand for that commodity drops, so does the price. In September 1990, Simon won his bet.

But what if we artificially raised the price of commodities? What if we imposed a blanket tax across all physical resources, or an international sustainable commodity agreement (since, remember, there is no world government), from plastic to wood to textiles? Then the cost of commodities would go up across the board, and force a drop in consumption. At the moment the free market economy leads to the extraction of materials as cheaply as possible and, by the same logic, the production of commodities as cheaply as possible. The economy is entirely geared around keeping costs low and profit high. But what if we gave up on that?

Perhaps we should start by getting all the economic caveats out of the way. Lowering income tax would leave us better off. But why do we tax income in the first place? Because it’s so abundant. Human labour is more or less universal and virtually inexhaustible. If you tax certain materials, people will use less of them and your tax revenues will gradually decrease. It’s like taxing CO2 emissions – it’s a good idea if you want those emissions to drop, but as they drop you have to find other sources of revenue. While it is relatively common for eco-economists to propose material taxation, this is normally applied to selected materials, like aggregates or oil. The flows of materials that go into products are relatively small and so rarely feature. Only a small percentage of oil gets turned into plastics, for instance. Consequently economists tend to be more interested in taxing energy use rather than materials.

Let’s also be clear that this material surfeit – this over abundance that the new taxation regime aims to tackle – is a problem of the northern economies. The glut of cheap, disposable goods is not a problem in India or Africa. Indeed, a ramping up of industrialisation, with the resulting outpouring of cheap products, will be required to raise the living standards of a billion slum dwellers across the globe. How do we square that fact with this new environmental policy? And even within the increasingly socially divided countries of Europe, material taxation would be politically regressive, coming at great social cost. More expensive goods may be better for the environment but they are not better for the poor. There is a tendency to float economic solutions in isolation, as panaceas within a comfortably bourgeois world view, whereas in macroeconomics nothing exists in isolation, every action has, as they say, an equal and opposite reaction. Ikea is not just good for the middle-classes, it is good for the poor. Pound shops and dollar stores are good for the poor too.

Nevertheless, let’s put our qualms aside and explore what is compelling about this radical new economy. If owning products became prohibitively expensive, might we change our attitude to ownership altogether? The 17th-century philosopher John Locke justified ownership through the labour put into acquiring an object – so, for instance, if you pick acorns in the forest then they’re yours, you deserve them even though you are taking them out of the commons. Locke’s proviso, however, was that you had to put them to good use and you could only take as many as you could use without letting them waste or spoil, otherwise you were robbing others of the benefit. How many of us can justify owning the thousands of objects that we own along these lines?

The problem with ownership is that it comes with no responsibilities. We are free to do what we will with our property – use it, let it gather dust, dispose of it. If every piece of material in the world was more precious, then we might consider relinquishing ownership. One of Droog’s fictional companies leases goods, a system that we’re all familiar with. But leasing or renting are essentially less satisfying forms of ownership. Instead we might consider adopting stewardship. Then, we would effectively be caretakers of objects, looking after them temporarily not out of a duty to the objects themselves or to their real owners but to the environment from which they came and to which they will return.

In our imaginary sustainable future, waste would be taxed. Worse, it would be become socially unacceptable – or let’s push the boat out, why not illegal? If your neighbour saw you chucking an old keyboard out with the trash, she’d call the cops. Products would be made to last – no more built-in obsolescence. A vast industry would develop around recycling, reusing and repairing goods.

On the other hand, I do not see a future world full of things made of leftovers and junk. We may be a resourceful species and (from our positions of material comfort) we may well admire the ingenuity of someone in a South African township who turns a couple of Coke cans and a bundle of wires into a radio. But that is never going to satisfy us. Call it what you will, adhocism, hacker culture, favela chic, such strategies may be fashionable now but I’m not convinced they will dent the integral object designed from scratch. Much as we may admonish ourselves to learn from the slums of Mumbai and Rio we will probably not forego centuries’ worth of finessed cultural production for a Steampunky, Mad Max-style repurposing culture. With UP, Droog proposes dead stock being used as a raw material and redesigned as something else, something new. But by and large, when they die products should go to the great meltdown furnace in the sky, to be reincarnated as tomorrow’s commodity – a karmic loop of death and fetishism.

Would a tax on materials lead to immateriality or to greater materiality? Is it possible that in a world of expensive materials, products might take a much richer material form? A good analogy is publishing, where, as so much content moves online and paper and printing become increasingly expensive, books are rediscovering their old versatility, becoming more tactile and beautiful than they have been for decades. As the book moves into the territory of the luxury item, there is not necessarily a loss of content. The only difference is that you can’t sit on an e-sofa.

We like to speculate about the dematerialisation of objects. We imagine designs existing in the cloud, within an economy of digital files that we buy or trade, customise, and, when absolutely necessary, print out. Again the question of ownership arises – do we need the physical thing? In the exhibition Droog have included a virtual shopping game, with all the satisfaction of retail therapy and none of the material burden. Will it scratch that neural itch?

And what of the Milan furniture fair? What of our beloved chairs, displayed proudly by the thousand every year in the name of consumer choice, innovation, progress – even though most of them are no better than the several thousand exhibited the previous year. Oh yes, the Milan furniture fair…

Part Two

In the end, there was no reason to have the world’s biggest furniture fair in Milan anymore – just tradition. The Italian furniture industry had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, a century’s worth of industrial expertise concentrated in a few small but powerful luxury brands. The fair remained a prestigious cultural event, the design world still flew in en masse, but if it was actual product you were after then the black market design fair in Kinshasa was a better bet.

The great exhibition halls at Rho had always had their hierarchies, but now they were thoroughly polarised. At the western end you had Sector 4, the waste sector, full of recycled and upcycled goods. Sector 4 was the Euro-slum. It had the feel of some techno-medieval bazaar, where almost anything might turn up reincarnated as something else by those crafty masters of SDR – salvage, disassemble, recompose. At the eastern end you had its opposite, Sector 1, otherwise known as License Zone. Any brand that could afford a rare materials license exhibited here, doing things the old-fashioned way, with new stainless steel and fresh tropical hardwoods. It was mainly frequented by Qatari hoteliers and Belarusian gangsters, along with a smattering of the international jetset, nostalgists one and all. The security screening just to enter Sector 1 was worse than any airport’s.

Between these poles lay Sectors 2 and 3, the sprawling heartlands of the new design industry, known collectively as the Data Haven. Part social forum and part trading floor, this was where the real business was done. Here, the rapidly dematerialising world of design gathered to sell services as varied as data visualisation, strategic system planning and virtual shopping guidance. There were still material goods sold here, but mostly these catered to the new ethos of minimum-possession living. Calvinist asceticism, Zen minimalism, Persian carpets and Brazilian tribal traditions commingled in a weirdly hybrid aesthetic. Homes were sparse, made comfortable by nomadic mainstays such as rugs, cushions and hammocks. This was RAG (roll-and-go) minimalism, not so much aesthetic connoisseurship as travelling-light kudos.

The hot new products, though, were all virtual. The real commodities, the media-fodder, were the digital wire-frames that you printed out if you wanted to materialise them. The single most disruptive force in furniture design was the polyblocks. These were a product of IET 2, the second international eco-taxation agreement, which led to plastic rationing. Everyone was allowed four 2.5kg blocks of structural-strength plastic, which you could have rapid-manufactured into any form you liked – Rococo chairs, café tables, you name it – as long as the combined weight didn’t exceed 10kg. When you were bored of those forms, you simply took the products to be melted down and reprinted in one of the myriad new fashions, or simply to your own design. These shape-shifting products were so versatile that they allowed genuinely seasonal change, or, if you were fickle enough, monthly change.

The designs themselves all existed in the cloud. Consequently, many of the halls in Sector 2, were bare except for grids marked out on the floor. To see the products being exhibited, you had to stand in a square and view the design on your phone. Prices, naturally, were detached from material cost – as everything was made of the same material – and were based solely on the quality, effectiveness or exclusivity of the design. Designs on the grid were bought and traded obsessively, and they were tested and debated in the hundreds of forums and juries that took place during the week of the fair. Prizes were awarded, photographs snapped and stars made.

The only downside, if it can be called that, was that you had to look after your 10 kilos of plastic. You did not own them, you were merely looking after them for the government, which carried out annual material audits to make sure that every ounce was accounted for. You could sell or trade your polyblocks, but everything had to be recorded and trackable (of course a black market in polyblocks existed). Every design, meanwhile, had a serial number, and these too were recorded in your purchase history. This data was all known to whomever it was that owned the cloud, and it was sold on to data harvesters who then sold it on to marketing companies, who then advertised their wares on the homescreen of your phone. In that respect, there was nothing new under the sun.

Published on the occasion of Material Matters during the International Furniture Fair in Milan, April 17 -22, 2012

“It’s not like design will ever stop turning out products, but designers should stop thinking every need should be satisfied with a product” – Renny Ramakers

Interview with Renny Ramakers
by Agata Jaworska 

This year in Milan, Droog presents Material Matters, a future furniture fair. The presentation speculates the impact of a shift in policy from taxing income to taxing raw materials and waste, and its impact on the design industry. The future fair features 20 design companies—both real and imagined—that might come to thrive given the change in policy.

How did this idea come about?

I read an article in the newspaper. Economists, ecologists, political scientists and other scientists were envisioning an alternative economic model in which sustainability is built into the system. One of the things they imagined was that income tax was replaced with tax on raw materials and waste, giving a few examples of what might happen—like no more packaging , new businesses based on recycling, repairing and leasing…

That inspired me. I thought it could also inspire designers and the design industry. Designers are trained to design products. Every year designers and design companies go to Milan, and every year, we see so many new products. Milan is full of new for the sake of new.

When I read the article, I realized some designers are already working in a way that fits into the scenario. Dirk Vander Kooij reprograms abandoned machines into 3D printers that make products using material made of old fridges. Markus Kayser prints products in the desert using the sand as the raw material and the sun as the energy source. Studio Swine proposes fishing plastic debris from the sea, turning it into products on a converted boat factory.

I imagined an alternative fair full of these kind of initiatives. We brought together existing initiatives and invented new ones. The imaginary fair presents some 20 design companies based on the premise that raw materials are taxed and therefore they become very expensive. One invented company, Gallery™ sells what used to be ordinary goods as collectibles. Another, Optical World™ sells illusions. Sometimes we really need a chair to sit on, but sometimes it’s the image that we’re after.

Currently quite a few companies are dealing with environmental issues. What’s the difference with Material Matters?

Environmentally friendly design is still mostly about designing products which harm the environment as little as possible, by using sound resources and by designing products that can be easily taken apart. Material Matters is more narrow because it is only dealing with material scarcity, but at the same time it is broader because it suggests completely different responses. An option could indeed be upcycling, recycling or waste management. But I am looking for more ways to tackle the issue. Maybe renting things is better than a chair that you can recycle. Or if a product lasts your whole life then maybe recyclability is not the most important thing. It is important to broaden the scope.

Essentially the Fair presents business models. Could you see it as a collection of ideas that others could appropriate?

You can think about what impact this scenario would have on companies like IKEA. Its unique selling point is that the products are very affordable, but once materials become expensive, what would their selling point become? They could—just like we do with UP™— upgrade IKEA’s dead stock or offer second hand IKEA furniture. People could return used products, IKEA could redesign them, and people could buy redesigned IKEA stuff.

You could also think of developing new materials from alternative resources, like Suzanne Lee does with BioCouture™, creating fashion with bacteria. Another direction could be designing services instead of products, like teaching people how to furnish their house without buying new products. That’s what Waste Watchers™ does.

Play Shop™, a game that satisfies your need for shopping without buying anything, is an extreme example. How do you see the role of the designer with something like Play Shop™?

A designer could have designed the game. It’s not like design will ever stop turning out products, but designers should stop thinking that every need should be satisfied with a product. Sometimes something else might do.

You bring together reality and fiction in an interesting way, almost not making a distinction between the two. How do you see this?

The ambiguity between the real and the fake creates cohesion. Each company is almost like a one-liner, presented in a tongue-in-cheek way. It’s really about the diversity of possible responses, on the level of the business model and not the details. It doesn’t matter if they are real or fictional.

How do you see the design profession changing?

When Gijs Bakker and I created Droog, we noticed new directions in product design, bundled them and gave them a name. Now, almost 20 years later, you can see that there are quite a number of new directions that designers are going into, less related to product design. Product designers are finding new ways to create a business. Processes are becoming important.

When you look at the profession from the specific angle of material scarcity, you get a very diverse landscape. Material Matters is about virtual design, it’s about reuse, it’s about inventing new materials, it’s about durability, it’s about renting things. It is a mixture of totally different initiatives that at first glance seem not to be related. Bringing this together as a Furniture Fair can have an impact.

Why did you bring them together as a Fair, and not something else?

Just like in 1993, we are bundling the sign of the time. In 1993 this was based on bringing together new visions on products. Now we are bundling business models, scenarios, processes. A fair means that every participant is independent. So many designers are starting their own businesses. I wanted to open the fair to them. This year the fair is imaginary, and is curated by us. We hope to host a real fair next time.

Do you think we need the policy change in order to get such a movement going?

The imagined policy change is the start of a thought experiment to speculate on design. Of course there are also negative aspects to taxing materials, like the disproportional impact on people who do not have much money. The point is not to convince the government that we should make the shift. It’s better to create a movement, and by-pass the need to make policy change.

The project started with imagining that policy changed. The government nudging people with new tax incentives. But in a way, the fair becomes a nudge for the design industry, minus the paternalism that would have come with the policy change.

Nowadays economists are taking into account the environment in their models, seeing biodiversity and water as economic assets. Material Matters wants to inspire designers to do the same—to build business models with environmental concerns at the core. It would be fantastic if this would generate a boom of new initiatives, building an industry of small creative companies that invent new businesses. And we never would reach the need to tax materials.

More details.

Lecture by Wouter Vanstiphout presented at WIJkonomie Tarwewijk 
Netherlands Architecture Institute
February 22nd, 2012

Tarwewijk, with its many immigrants and vacancy rates, still 20%, is one of the poorest and most densely built neighbourhoods in Rotterdam. The area symbolizes more or less the rigidity of the social economic problems of Rotterdam South, and many similar areas in the Netherlands. More than 30 years of mitigating policies and politically correct euphemisms have not been able to solve the structural problems in these neighbourhoods, and also is recently become more and more unable to conceal them any longer.
The project in which we are all participating today is part of a tradition of incidental and superficial attempts by parties from outside of the area that combine an extremely short lived fashionable interest to a misleading optimistic tone. Partly the problems in Tarwewijk are fundamental and historically determined, the 6000 dwellings that this neighbourhood consists of were built next to the harbour, and both entities—neighbourhood and the harbor—were completely dependent upon each other. But, when the harbour moved westward and, as a consequence of containerization, demanded a much smaller and much more highly educated work force, this part of Rotterdam South remained behind as an economic orphan.
What once was the biggest asset of this neighbourhood, its vicinity to the harbour companies, became its biggest disadvantage—a position of isolation within the city. When the old harbour basins in the South were transformed into urban areas from the 80s and the 90s onwards to attract the new middle classes and the creative classes, the old quarters like Tarwewijk had already been isolated for too long, and had accumulated too many problems, and had become too much dependent upon the public sector to even be able to find a connection with this new economy.
Also, the post-industrial socio-economic policies of governmental aid to the unemployed and the urban renewal policies of the 70s, have led to an over-dependence of the neighbourhood on governmental aid, and thereby also indirectly on the whims of the politicians who run the city and who run the subsidies. Urban renewal in the 70s especially brought a spatial approach that was based purely on housing and neighbourhood life, and not at all on the economy or job creation. This caused the removal of economic activities from the streets and the blocks, and transformed a once lively and most privately owned neighbourhood into a mass of subsidizing housing. As an addition, urban renewal also created a gigantic bureaucracy of municipal planners, social workers, housing corporation managers, municipal administrators, and more recently, artists, designers, curators, historians, etc. This bureaucracy, through it’s background and its tradition, has formed a thick sediment of paternalistic policies, which is perhaps the biggest single problem of Rotterdam South and Tarwewijk .
Today, we also find an extraordinary density of smaller and bigger projects, shorter and even more short projects, policies, plans and processes—a misty rainforest which the residents and the entrepreneurs of the area cannot cut through—but which has proven extremely profitable for the consultants, the designers, the artists and managers, as you and I included.
The 20% vacancy in Tarwewijk—of which dozens of units are actually owned by the city itself, which is kind of an embarrassing fact—is a painful symbol of the municipal incompetence in coping with this neighbourhood and its fundamental problems. It does seem much easier these days to organize another cultural event than to make sure that at least some of the blocks are inhabited in a healthy and sustainable way.
However, the opportunity that the 20% vacancy in this neighbourhood offers, is also there. It could mean a different approach to the problems in Tarwewijk. We can observe that the entrepreneurial vitality in Rotterdam South is due to a bunch of successful entrepreneurs with small, often family businesses that employ ten, twenty, sometimes more people. For a large part, these entrepreneurs are of immigrant descent. The urban renewal culture however, has meant that when we think about immigrant, entrepreneurs, etc., we always focus on the smallest ones, the weakest ones, the ones that are starting, and we kind of ignore the ones that really have a presence there and feel frustrated by the incredible density of bureaucratic regulations.
So we tend to favour the unsuccessful ones over the successful ones, and individuals over the job-creating companies. For the local entrepreneurs this web of environmental, spatial and economic policies is making it increasingly difficult for them to maintain, expand or modernize their business in the streets and blocks of Rotterdam South and Tarwewijk.
There are many examples of local entrepreneurs who came to the city because they wanted to expand their business, take over an empty work space and put their bakery or whatever it was there, and the city said “No, no, no, because we and a branding agency have determined that this area has a theme that is called “Eat and Meet,” or “Eat and Greet,” or “Cultural Factory,” or whatever. These brands, kind of like bombshells, land in this area and make life impossible.
We, in all our humility, propose to show a glimpse of another approach to Tarwewijk, with an experimental project that is completely focused on the possibilities for local entrepreneurs that are above a certain level of solvability and ambition. We want to prevent these potentially much more successful entrepreneurs from leaving, and we want to attract others like them to the neighbourhood by offering them a certain degree of freedom that is rare to come by in the Netherlands these days, along with space and clustering that cannot be found in any other inner-city area. We will make them—and I’m quoting the Corleone family here—“an offer they can’t refuse.”
The 20% vacancy and the rapid rate of house circulation makes it feasible that within a few years, one or more of the blocks from the 30s in Tarwewijk could be vacated completely. This could be done by joining up empty apartments in the entire area into extremely large new apartments open to many more flexible uses than the current ones. These will be offered to the inhabitants of the block we want to vacate, for the same price as their current apartment. Once these people have been rehoused, the remaining vacancy can be used to cater to the housing wishes of the other inhabitants and eventually even to newcomers to the area.
This obviously presupposes an extremely consistent and well-integrated policy of housing allocation of the remaining blocks, which would actually mean that the municipality would have to work together with the housing corporations and with its own fragmented departments and services. But this should fully fit within the competence of housing associations and the municipalities, and yes, it is a top-down approach, which is exactly why we vote and pay taxes.
The freed blocks can then be isolated from the surrounding urban and bureaucratic tissue by marking them a “Special Economic Block”—a safe area from the municipal policies concerning environment, sectoring, building and housing inspection, urban renewal, creative economy, and regulations for the catering industry, to name just a few. The blocks will be reconfigured into bigger lots of at least 500 square meters. They will be given away for free to entrepreneurs who issue both a strong business plan and an investment commitment. Here we were inspired by the extremely paradigmatic and successful ‘Wallisblok’ initiative, where unsellable houses were given away for free to new owners with a plan and the financial means to spend on their transformation.
The transformation of the Tarwewijk block would range from a modest change to a complete demolition and reconstruction of the lot and the related courtyard area. Only safety regulations, building alignment, and inconvenience to adjoining businesses are limiting factors. There is one more limiting factor to the kinds of businesses that we allow—no creative industries are allowed.
The whole process will be made possible through a temporary task force that will be abolished as soon as the last lot is given away and the plans are realized. Lots will finally remain property of the entrepreneurs.
Finally, the major strategic mistake in urban renewal was the banishment of work from the working class neighbourhoods for environmental or other reasons. This resulted in a mono-cultural, dependent and poor neighbourhood. We turn this around, by profiting from the vacancy as vehicle to bring back businesses into the neighbourhood. We transform empty dwellings into work places to restore some of the spatial economic logic that Rotterdam South lost when the harbour moved out. We hope that the combination of A. the strong urban structure of the blocks, B. the proven entrepreneurial spirit of the participants, C. the liberation from administrative barriers to entrepreneurship, and D. the taboo-free architectural transformation, will lead to an inner-city special economic zone, or Special Economic Block.

More information on WIJkonomie Tarwewijk.

Renny Ramakers will be one of the interviewees at the second edition of ‘Hands On!’ During this edition Renny Ramakers will take part in the discussion about ‘investigative design’ together with head curator Kris Kallens of the Zuiderzeemuseum  and designers Christien Meindertsma and Lex Pott. Jeroen Junte, Volkskrant-journalist and writer of the book: ‘Hands on: Dutch design in de 21ste eeuw’, is going to be the moderator.

Pakhuis de Zwijger | www.dezwijger.nl

Platform voor creatie en innovatie

woensdag 21 mrt | 20.00 – 22.00 uur | grote zaal

gratis entree, aanmelden via: >> dezwijger.nl/handson2

Amongst great influential women such as Angela Merkel and Oprah Winfrey, co-founder and director of Droog, Renny Ramakers has been named one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World” by Newsweek. As stated by Newsweek, “Whenever a woman or girl gains control of her destiny, the local standard of living goes up and the values of human rights spread. So this year, and every year, Newsweek has honored local heroes, and the growing network of powerful women who support their efforts.”

Within the list of 150 Fearless Women List, women have been honored for making their voices heard. Renny Ramakers believes design is active in all layers of society: “The capacity of design does not only express itself through products, graphics or garments but also through tools, services, scenarios, new business models and other ways of benefitting society.”

Design for download, up cycling dead stock, learning from the local context, producing and selling products – these are all things Droog is engaged with and why Renny Ramakers is named as one the Women Who Shake the World by Newsweek. As stated by Newsweek:

Art historian turned curator turned environmental trendsetter, Renny Ramakers has put a different kind of green conscience into design with UP, the Dutch innovator’s latest venture. Initiated by Droog, a firm she cofounded that took the design world by storm, UP is a collaborative effort among companies to cut down on waste by using surplus materials to create new goods. The movement’s many partners have created a rapidly growing line of chic “leftover” products from dead-stock items repurposed in inventive ways.

“It is one of the best kept secrets: everyday, tonnes of sellable products are recycled or simply destroyed worldwide, resulting in an unacceptable loss of material and energy. Recycling in practice is down-cycling; many recycled materials are processed into inferior products,” stated Renny Ramakers at the UP conference on November 3rd, 2011 in Amsterdam.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/features/150-women-who-shake-the-world.html

More information about UP: http://up.droog.com/

The Tarwewijk case

by Renny Ramakers

In 2011 the renowned American critic Bruce Nussbaum posted a blog with the title “Is Humanitarian design the new imperialism?” This controversial statement came into my mind when we were confronted with cynical inhabitants of the Rotterdam neighbourhood Tarwewijk.

Tarwewijk has always been a problematic neighbourhood in the South of Rotterdam. It is one of the poorest and most densely populated districts of Rotterdam, inhabited by a high amount of immigrants who leave the area as soon as they get a chance, resulting in a 20% vacancy rate. There is also a high percentage of unemployment and illiteracy. It is one of those neighbourhoods that we would call “disadvantaged” and therefore, it is destined to attract a lot of well-intentioned temporary interventions by all kinds of parties including artists, designers and social workers. I think every city has such a pampered neighbourhood–an ideal target for social design.

Our ambitions for Tarwewijk were triggered by Open House, a oneday event we did in New York’s prototypical suburb of Levittown in 2011 in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “Discover your inner service provider”was the motto as inhabitants collaborated with designers to establish businesses in their homes. The aim was to bring more vitality and interaction into the suburb, and also to improve its economic circumstances. A number of inhabitants opened their homes for a one-day business—including an unemployed teacher who opened a classroom and an avid gardener who opened a backyard farm. Architects Hayley Eber and Frank Gesualdi of EFGH created a model proposing ways of modifying existing regulations in order to enable such a bottom-up service economy to emerge in the suburbs.

Open House presented a model that we then wanted to test in a totally different kind of neighbourhood. We found Tarwewijk, a place where residents already were running their own businesses behind the facades, businesses like hairdressing, travel advise and radio broadcasting. Together with the inhabitants we wanted to make the existing network of hidden business activity visible and to celebrate Tarwewijk as a business district. At the same time we wanted to propose new strategies that would re-introduce work into daily life within the neighbourhood, loosening regulations and creating affordable workspaces. With a team of designers and our partners we have been working to make this happen.

However, when we approached the inhabitants, we were confronted with stark cynicism. They considered our project as one of those short-lived intitiatives that they have encountered so many times before without any significant results. They accused the government that they were helping people to start a new business just because they want to get them off welfare support and to bring them into the tax system. They accused the architects that they steal their ideas: “You take our ideas, use them elsewhere and then you are gone!…Sorry, but we don’t trust you architects”. The residents of Tarwewijk seem to be fed up with all these patronizing attempts to help them.

At first I was shocked by these accusations but soon I began to realize that they were right. There is a gap between the design world and the people that designers want to reach. I started to distrust all this social work. I don’t doubt all the good intentions but who specializes in social design also needs victims—it’s their bread and butter. It’s time for a more strategic and long-term approach that has real impact.
We decided to cancel the one-day design event and to restrict ourselves to implementing thelonger lasting concepts and strategies. We installed The Economat by Thomas Lommée, a converted photo booth which invites inhabitants to capture, describe and locate their personal “demands” or “supplies,” mapping and expanding the existing network of hidden homeworkers. The Green Machine by Doepel Strijkers, a production unit for compost that connects children to urban agriculture was installed in a centrally-located playground and connected to an existing family network.

Wouter Vanstiphout (Crimson) who was also participating in our project placed our project rightfully in the tradition of “incidental, exogenous and superficial attempts that an extremely short-lived, fashionable interest linked to a misleading optimistic tone”. The proposal he developed with Maxwan architects stood out because it is a strategy to stimulate long-lasting entrepreneurship in the neighbourhood. Tapping into the 20% vacancy rate in Tarwewijk, they allocated existing building blocks as a Special Economic Block, a safe area from municipal regulations, thematic zoning policies and trends in urban renewal and creative industries: “Freed from this, the blocks will attract the entrepreneurial energy, investments and jobs potentially already existing in the neighbourhood”. The Special Economic Block is worth investigating. It will attract entrepreneurial energy and it will create jobs. The rest is left for the inhabitants.

The question that is left behind is what is the role of designers in solving the socio-economic problems of these kind of neighbourhoods? Do those neighbourhoods need well-intentioned design stunts or are they better off with different municipal policies, loosening regulations, and more space and tools for self-organization. If we look at Dharavi, the pampering child of Mumbai, we see that the informal economy of this slum is blossoming (though of course there remain many pressing problems). And we see that the informal activity does not happen in isolation. Dharavi supplies luxurious hotels and restaurants in Mumbai. It is interesting how the formal and informal economy are co-dependent. Of course, circumstances are different in our part of the world, but giving space for more informal developments by the residents themselves should be recognized as a key way of moving forward. This is the role of design—to see how the informal activities that are happening already can be connected to broader strategies. Design should make the step from short-lived interventions to long-term strategies that cover all dimensions of the situation.

by Renny Ramakers

It all started with Open House, a one-day event that we did in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro that took place in the prototypical suburb of Levittown, New York in 2011. Homes were opened up for business exchange, with the aim of reviving the suburbs through a bottom-up service economy that would introduce more contact and density into the neighbourhood. With this successful one-day event, we created a model that could revive neighbourhoods through self-created service exchange.

With the aim of testing the model in a completely different area, we teamed up with Jan Konings and Kosmopolis Rotterdam, who had been engaging with the informal work community in Tarwewijk, a multicultural community with considerable unemployment and illiteracy in the South of Rotterdam. Since Tarwewijk has a robust network of hidden business activity—from haircutting to car repair and radio broadcasting—we wanted to bring invisible business practice into public space and celebrate Tarwewijk as a business district.

Tarwewijk has come to symbolize the toughness of the socio-economic problems in the South of Rotterdam, and has suffered from being a testing ground for outsiders. However, it turned out that so many people have been trying to propose local change—often well-intentioned but short-lived—that many residents have become cynical to outsiders’ ideas. Therefore, rather than doing a one-day design event, we decided to implement projects in collaboration with residents and local organizations committed to continuity and to organize a design presentation and symposium at Netherlands Architecture Institute, where documentation of the installations will be shown and the Special Economic Block proposal by Crimson with Maxwan will be presented to decision makers.

The presentation will also show Masterplan by Jan Konings, a representation of how Tarwewijk might look in the near future, featuring concepts by TD Architects, Doepel Strijkers and Crimson with Maxwan. The Way We Are, an animation on the future of Tarwewijk’s identity by TD Architects will be screened. Documentation of the installation of De Economaat, a social machine that maps and visualizes micro-economic activities by Thomas Lommée with Netherlands Architecture Institute will be shown. Footage of the installation of Green Machine, a production unit for agricultural compost to be sold or exchanged by children by Doepel Strijkers Architects will be screened. Reaction of locals to our plans will be revealed.

The symposium, moderated by journalist Yvonne Zonderop, will feature Ole Bouman (NAI), Charles Renfro (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Jan Konings, Robert Kloosterman (professor of Economic Geography and Planning, University of Amsterdam) and myself.

Join us:
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Start: 19:30h (doors opens at 19:00h)
Language: English
Location: Auditorium NAI (Museumpark 25, Rotterdam)
Admission: € 5 / € 3 for students / free for Friends of the NAI
Register.
More information coming soon.

WIJkonomie Tarwewijk is organized by Droog in collaboration with Jan Konings, Kosmopolis Rotterdam and Netherlands Architecture Institute, and is supported by DOEN Foundation.