Low-tech Magazine

How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware

Reverting to traditional handicrafts is one way to sabotage the throwaway society. In this article, we discuss another possibility: the design of modular consumer products, whose parts and components could be re-used for the design of other products.

Initiatives like OpenStructures, Grid Beam, and Contraptor combine the modularity of systems like LEGO, Meccano and Erector with the collaborative power of digital success stories like Wikipedia, Linux or WordPress.

An economy based on the concept of re-use would not only bring important advantages in terms of sustainability, but would also save consumers money, speed up innovation, and take manufacturing out of the hands of multinationals. 

The art of producing sustainable consumer goods: basketry

This is a guest post by Brian Kaller, who blogs at Restoring Mayberry.

Baskets have been replaced by plastic and other kinds of factory-made containers in almost every area of life, appearing today mainly as twee Easter decorations. Making them has become synonymous with wasting time – “basket-weaving” in the USA is slang for an easy lesson for slow students.

The craft of basketry, however, might be one of our species’ most important and diverse technologies, creating homes, boats, animal traps, armour, tools, cages, hats, chariots, weirs, beehives, shelters and furniture, as well as all manner of containers. Basket weaving makes use of fast-growing biodegradable materials -- branches, twigs or shoots -- that requires the forest to be cultivated rather than cleared. Basketry allows almost anyone, with little or no money and few tools, to create a large variety of useful goods in a way that is one hundred percent sustainable.

Automata: engineering for a post-oil world?

Our fascination with sophisticated technology lies at the core of many of our present-day problems. Yet, it need not be. By definition, technical virtuosity doesn't need to result in yet another electronic gadget or an even faster accelerating sports car. It can also lead to stunning yet completely harmless artefacts called "automata".

These are mostly hand-cranked machines that can be extremely complex, often with the only purpose of astonishing the spectator. Automata have been built for more than 2,000 years, but contemporary artists have elevated the craft to a higher level. Aside from their emotional value, automata offer a glimpse of a future, post-oil technology.

The sky is the limit: human powered cranes and lifting devices

From the earliest civilisations right up to the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans used sheer muscle power, organisation skills and ingenious mechanics to lift weights that would be impossible to handle by most power cranes in operation today.

Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls

Oven stoves are greener, more efficient, healthier, safer and cosier than all modern heating systems. Why are they gone and how do we get them back?

An oven stove is a very efficient and robust oven that radiates heat all day. In the US it was introduced only 20 years ago, but in Europe the technology is almost one thousand years old. Especially in Russia, Scandinavia and Central Europe the oven stove has a long and rich tradition.

In the 18th century, several European governments financed research to improve the technology, as a way to overcome an acute shortage of firewood: ecotech before the term existed. However, its further development and distribution was thwarted by the arrival of coal, gas and oil. Oven stoves are large, heavy and slow, but they offer so many advantages that they – again - deserve to be subsidized by the government.

Tiles as a substitute for steel: the art of the timbrel vault

The craftsmanship associated with timbrel vaulting has long vanished, but the achievements are still with us today.

Brick, stone and concrete are materials strong in compression (you can pile them up almost indefinitely), but weak in tension (if the structural breadth increases, the material has to be supported by many columns or it collapses).

Nowadays, this problem is solved by steel structures or the use of steel reinforced concrete - the tensile strength of steel is significantly more than that of bricks, stone or plain concrete. Pre World War II, the weak tensile strength of brick was compensated for by superior craftsmanship.

The "timbrel vault" allowed for structures that today no architect would dare to build without steel reinforcements. The technique was cheap, fast, ecological and durable.

When rich women built houses

How did ladies spend their time when married to extremely rich men in an era before television, speed-dating and summer festivals? You build a dolls' house (a "dollhouse" if you are American). These incredibly detailed miniature houses and interiors were constructed between the 17th and the early 20th century, mostly by wealthy ladies who often paid artists and craftsmen to make all kinds of objects and parts for them.

A steam powered submarine: the Ictíneo

Few Victorian inventions have the grace and charm of the Ictíneo, the series of two wooden submarines built by Narcís Monturiol i Estarrol in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Unlike some of the better known early submarines from his contemporaries in Germany, France and the United States, the Catalan inventor managed to build submarines that operated flawlessly.

The Ictíneo II was the first combustion engine driven submarine ever, pioneering concepts that were only rivalled in the 1940s. Sadly, both submarines were eventually scrapped and Monturiol died penniless and forgotten.