I'm quite interested at the moment in using craft with materials commonly considered waste as a social object through which we build community.
Writing that sentence made me think about what these things are best called. "Community Building Social Object" perhaps. I like that because it abbreviates as CBSO which is also the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra but it does avoid the repetition over and over of a ten-syllable phrase while helping you to remember it.
Aside: What's that called? When you draw attention to an abbreviation holding a meaning other than what you're talking about, in order to reinforce a point? Perhaps that it's new, perhaps that it's different? And in order to unconsciously hack into some human memory feature - it's a kind of meme-grafting I suppose.
Anyway. My friend Ian Willey is very good at this stuff. He has a FB (ugh! but worth it!) group called Wastecraft which deals mostly with the possible inputs you might be able to use and what techniques can lead to interesting products. For me, I then lay the social interaction on top of that - doing this stuff helps us think and act together and build relationships while doing something potentially useful. That's what I mean by making community out of the things you have lying around.
It also fits into the 5 'R's of Zero Waste philosophy. We can refuse products and packaging that we consider unfriendly or inappropriate, and we can reduce our reliance on such things, but then how best to reuse, recycle and rot? And I think the best ways of doing this is together, learning, teaching and having fun while making something useful.
So there are fully finished, reusable objects that help people connect, and there are repair activities that people can do together too. At the other end of the scale, there are recycling activities like home-made recycled paper for art and the interesting experiments in the Precious Plastics community to create open-source technologies for small-scale plastic recycling. And in between there's the ideas of building something new out of old materials that are either perfectly good for building or too difficult to reuse or recycle, which is where Ian's interests and mine overlap.
So I'm collecting materials and doing some experiments. I'm drawn to using the slightly gloss (is that the right word?) paper that gets used in packaging and particularly in take-away bags from coffee-shops for kinds of useful origami. Origami is a great exercise to do in a group - it's simple enough and easy to correct if you get it wrong - and it gets the fingers and brains working nicely together.
