Profit is at the core of production today. We see that businesses and leading industries are driven by expanding profits while minimizing labor costs. They export pollution and maximize production, while advertising for products we don’t really need. Moreover, they manufacture products with materials, and resources extracted in exploitative ways, with both social and environmental consequences. These cataclysmic events, such as heatwaves, coldwaves, fires, droughts, flooding, marine heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and coastal erosion, ultimately harm the people and communities least prepared to overcome these challenges.

At the core of these issues lies the way in which we consume, produce and dispose of. We need to turn our focus away from individual responsibility, to the root of the manufacturing process and the systems these processes operate within.

This diploma looks at how we, as creators of products, might look at materials through a radically different lens. The way in which we source these materials, and utilize them in the products we design and manufacture.

The aim of this project is to demonstrate the potential of using locally sourced materials in the production of new products. I hope to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs to seek out novel materials or consider existing materials in radically different ways. Additionally, I aim to encourage these actors to share their knowledge and information about these methods of production, material sourcing and product development openly, so that others may replicate, learn from, and build upon them.

A result of this is a backpack, a proof of potential, made from bicycle inner tubes, milk bottle caps and plastic packaging. All sourced from within five kilometers of its final assembly.