LIKE RETROFITTING
There should be enough manufactured stuff in the world now to service our sustainable needs for some time into the mid-term future. If all that was and will be thrown away in the coming decades were able to be turned into resources for renewal of all that makes up our built environments, we could be sustainable without the need for sourcing raw materials. This ambition is not helped by how few existing materials and structures have been designed for reuse or recycling. It is also clearly not viable in regard to the myriad of unsustainable desires each of us has, but with just a little demand management, we could create sustainable lifestyles and workpractices reusing existing manufactured materials and products.
There should be no need for example, for most cities to continue developing greenfield sites. Retrofitting of existing products and sites can and must be a major activity in all industries. Every form of design education should be not just about learning how to make something, but how to make that thing through an act of remaking; for every design idea proposed there should also be an account of what existing manufactured materials are going to be used and how they are going to accessed. In this regard, most design education is at the moment only teaching half of the whole picture.
The sustainment that comes from retrofitting however does not only consist in minimised resource consumption. It derives from the changed attitude that accompanies all acts of remaking. If, as a designer of new products and environments, I am responsible for sourcing the materials for my designs from what currently exists, then I am more likely to make sure that what I am designing will, in the future, make available other design possibilities, either through modifications or materials recovery.
This means that the sustainments are not just retrofits, but pro-retrofits, retrofits designed to facilitate future retrofits. Sustainments are remakings designed to be remade.
