From the Future — Material Libraries & Reactivation
Material libraries, like book libraries and tool libraries, are where you can experience a bit of a wide variety of materials. From there you can connect with sample sources, places where scrap material is available often for free, depending on the size or material, for use in one’s projects.
Businesses and industries of various sizes contributed and coordinated these libraries to facilitate a fair portion of the waste management they were tasked with by regulation. They could no longer just consider it waste and dump it somewhere, and there wasn’t sufficient creativity within the industry to solve their problems with people who’d come up within those prior incentive structures. So they started by gathering materials together and instead of the showcases to sell / market the remaining minorly improved version the conference invited artists, makers, crafters, and researchers from various domains to experience the materials. Characteristics of each material were standardized to some extent — think melt point, composition, tensile strength, weight per x. Various formations of the same material were treated as separate materials, though if one were interested in one variant, the others were noted as other paths of inquiry.
People could search by material characteristics, by source, by color… or they could just wander the collection and hands on with the material and see the noted characteristics presented alongside. In either case, folks who expressed interest / curiosity about particular materials were connected to each other for further discussion along with information about an expert in the material for further reference.
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From fashion refuse through construction off-cuts, and a variety of other sources, these material meet-ups evolved into communities of re-use. As new paths of re-use at various scales were developed, formal and informal networks of acquisition, design, and distribution were formulated. There was some seasonality and/or spurts and stops given the wide variety of sources and the shifts in application and processes related to this former “waste” stream. That was assumed and these new applications and communities had no desire to create some massive new use for a material unless it was something that provided greater impact to the quality of lives of people rather than just more for more’s sake.
Taking materials apart, and the toxic risks involved in some cases, became a priority application for the development of high dexterity robotics for scaled use. These were created in both human-driven (like with laparoscopic surgeries) and fully autonomous for specific use cases. Regardless, this allowed for further reuse of materials that had been crafted in the obsolescence era to be maximally extracted. This robotic development and the on-going deconstruction track of the reuse pipeline were funded by the companies and industries who had created these materials and operated (far too long) with an obsolescence-first mindset. The obsession with quantity over quality — i.e. growth for growth’s sake, not benefit to humanity, was one of the first areas that was massively overhauled. Much more common these days is the lagom of it all — just enough, the right amount, not too much. This all had started nascently with the rental mindset that had applied in some areas for decades, but evolved and expanded and contracted variously as more folks embraced it and realized how freeing of their own mental capacity it was to know that if they needed something they knew how to find it and it wouldn’t be that big a deal. We were so afraid of each other and territorial back then. It’s cute in its way. We put soooo much energy and effort into maintaining such an early level of cultural maturity. Very toddler, very “mine, go away” — teenage ish at best.
Once we recognized our binge/purge cycles and released the amount of judgement we projected on to others that really didn’t exist, we let a lot more out of our grip. Sure you had things you used often, clothes you loved, your various items that support your interests and aspects of your identity and communities, but the addiction to stuff became so clearly a forced-upon not an intrinsic issue.
Many folks’ contributions to the community takes the form of connecting people to those which would meet their needs. Is it knowledge, experience, conversation, material, tools,…? There are specialists and generalists in this connector domain, as in every other part of society, and there is a casualness in the intertwining of “the work” of the seeking/matching and just going about one’s day and hanging out and moving about your place and community.
This future imagining (the world in an optimistic 2045) was originally written as part of a daily hope practice I undertook in April 2025. You can read the summary of all 30 topics I touched on here. I recently revisited those entries as I found myself imagining additional, perhaps shorter term, futures and decided to publish the full length entries for several of my favorite imaginings with only light edits — mostly typos, some clarification.
Please comment/link below to evidence in support of this future already appearing, as we know the future arrives in small and big ways, daily.
