Questions and Content
With the project "Machine for Sustainable Living" Valentina Karga was investigating sustainability and self-sufficiency within the activities of daily life and the practice of the emerging DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. The project aimed towards self-production of all goods for contemporary living, such as electricity, biogas, food and biodiesel while collecting heat from the sun and rainwater. It also pointed in achieving a closed loop system. The design is flexible for application in global scale, adapting each time to local factors.
Use and Target Audience
As the proposal aims to realization, the researcher has started building the DIY installations. A working space-lab for constructing, performing and finalizing all installations is necessary. The researcher receives assistance from DIY internet-based communities, but a possible collaboration with scientists and engineers to improve the systems could bring a higher scientific value to the project. A blog (www.berlinfarmlab.tumblr.com) with category/ tag system is used as an online lab to archive the data found on the web or recorded by the researcher himself. The blog is also the medium that connects the research with the global online communities of each particular topic. Simultaneously with the practical research, an architectural and theoretical research of the application of the system in a city scale will be implemented. Interviews with scientists and theoreticians will further investigate this system plan.
Support from the Hybrid Plattform
Hybrid Plattform contributed to the interdisciplinary aspect of the project. The aim is to collaborate with scientists that deal with alternative energy resources, food research, ecology, and also with sociologists, economists and political science experts that study this new lifestyle model after the economical and environmental crisis. The collaboration with Prof. Stephan Pflugmacher-Lima from the Department Ecological Impact Research and Ecotoxicology has involved the intermediation of Hybrid Plattform. Together the team developed and built a small-scale test of the "Machine for Sustainable Living" with the integration of the "Green Liver", a natural water purification system by Prof. Stephan Pflugmacher-Lima.