Tag: Product Design

Design for the Real World: The NYC Trash Can

New York magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson shares how the trash can holds more than just garbage!

What does the NYC trash can look like?

It’s a very efficient design, and you can see all of the decisions that went into making it as lightweight, rugged and efficient as possible. It is made of perforated metal so that it’s really made mostly of air. It is lightweight because the trash collectors have to pick it up, turn it over and dump it into a garbage truck. In order to minimize waste, it doesn’t have a big plastic bag inside that would become part of the landfill, so the perforations have to be small enough that the litter doesn’t fall out out. It’s really constructed like a barrel with ribs, and it takes up the smallest footprint on the sidewalk so that the top is wider than the bottom. It’s a conical shape. It’s got a wide rim that says “Keep New York City Clean”, so it’s got a place for a slogan to exhort people to use it and throw trash into it.

For all those reasons, it is a very efficient machine given how trash moves through the city. It’s the most basic low-tech kind of trash can imaginable. It’s elegant enough by virtue of its efficiency to take its place on the city streets, but it’s not so attractive a piece of high design that people would want to steal it. It’s just not that good looking. And I think for the purposes of a NYC trash can, it’s a benefit.

What are the trash can’s most iconic features?

Its simplicity and its really basic efficiency. The words prominently displayed on top of it are also iconic, although I’m not sure how many people if you blindfolded them would remember if it says anything at all, let alone what the slogan is.

It’s kind of forest green so it doesn’t assert itself, and yet you know what exactly it is for. It’s just that really basic design combined with its perforation that makes it really rugged and present, but not an eyesore. I don’t want to say it disappears, but it’s clearly meant to be self-effacing.

What is the role of the trash can in this city?

One interesting thing is the number of trash cans in the city and how people used them have waxed and waned. A couple of decades ago, this was a dirty city and there was trash everywhere. One reason was because there weren’t enough trash cans and they weren’t emptied often enough. So people got into the habit of throwing litter on the sidewalk or in the subway. The city increased the number of trash cans on the street and made sure there was one on every corner, throughout the subway system, and the parks. They were also picked up regularly. There was also a whole campaign to get people to stop littering. It was successful and the amount of littering actually went down.

The interesting thing was having habituated people to hold on to their trash or pocket litter just long enough to deposit it in a trash can, they realized that the habit was going to remain even if they saved some money by lowering the number of trash cans or picking them up less often. They counted on people’s habits, that they would hold on to their litter just a little longer — maybe an extra block — until they found a trash can. So there’s always this kind of pushing and pulling. It has been very effective in the subways and they managed to save a lot of money by lowering the number of trash cans without increasing track litter.

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What does the NYC trash can say about the city?

One of the things a trash can tells you is a little about the trash once you put it in. A basic element of the trash can is the mechanism which the trash gets emptied. This is clearly an object that somebody is going to muscle up in the air, turn it, and dump the contents into a garbage truck. In this day and age, that is a completely primitive way to deal with trash. It’s also not necessary, and it’s not even common. Europeans use a lot more advanced trash can designs that lock on to the garbage trucks and get automatically turned over. 

As basic as the NYC trash can is, it fits into a system that relies heavily on staffing and the running of trucks through the city on a regular basis. There is the spilling of pollutants when the trash is brought to the central sorting points. So one way this trash can is not efficient is its indication that in a city that presents gigantic amounts of trash — most of it household trash, and not the kind of street litter these cans are for — it still hasn’t figured out an optimal way of how to reduce the waste we produce.

Do you have a personal story to share about the NYC trash can?

Every morning, I go to either to Riverside or Central Park with my dog, and of course, you’ve got to pick up after your dog. So all these dog walkers have these plastic bags full of dog poop that they have to dispose of. It’s been cold and freezing, and there’ s been a lot of snow which has impeded trash collection. There is something amusing about watching people trying to diligently pick up after their dog, bag the poop, and try to dispose of that bag in a trash can that is at this point not conical but pyramidal because the cone has been reversed. It is now a structure that contains a tower full of plastic bags that is rising considerably higher. You see all these people circling the trash can trying to figure out where they can deposit this bag so it won’t roll off the side and onto the ground. So you can see how sensitive the trash can design is to the efficiency of the pickup. If it’s not done, even in a day or two, you start to have a problem.

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Central Park’s new trash can designs by Landor Associates. PHOTO: INHABITAT.COM

Any thoughts on the increasing variety of trash can designs in the city?

For most people, their experience of a New York City trash can is one of many New York City trash cans. There is really a lot of variety. There is the basic standard one we’ve been talking about, but business improvement districts have their own design, often with sponsorships on the side, so it’s a form of advertising. The Central Park has its own kind of trash can that was designed in cooperation with Central Park Conservancy. Bryant Park has a much more elaborate kind of trash can with higher design elements because they have the staff to deal with that. So really, as you move throughout the city, it’s not a standardized appearance. You can practically tell where you are just by looking at a trash can. It’ll give you a lot of information on location.

Should trash cans become beautiful design elements in a cityscape?

It really depends on the context. When you are dealing with something that has to work on an urban scale and be produced in large quantities, the priority is on increasing the ease of use and minimizing cost. The trash can we have, given all the constraints I was talking about — how the trash is picked up and what happens to it afterwards — is a pretty good set of compromises. It’s not beautiful, but it serves a good function. When you get trash cans that are supposed to represent the neighborhood or a particular park, and become a design element in a kind of landscape, that’s fine and great, but it requires there to be a maintenance force which is costly. What you are doing is undoing a citywide standardization so that the trash can becomes an element of pride in that locality. In areas where there is a private business improvement district or conservancy that can deal with the implications of beautifying the trash can, that’s fine. But if you are going to beautify a neighborhood and rely on the city to pick up the implicit costs, then I don’t think it is a good idea because any money you are spending to beautify the trash can is taking it from some place else. It’s zero-sum game. The city has the responsibility to spread out this functionality evenly. It’s important that the city has created a trash can design that is city-wide and instantly recognizable by everybody.

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Written and recorded for Leital Molad’s Radio and Podcast class at D-Crit. The Q&A is an edited excerpt from a longer interview recorded in February 2014 . Thank you Justin Davidson for allowing me to share this.

Postdigital Production: Not So Out of Hand After All

Exhibition Review: Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital

Untitled #05 (2008) by Richard Dupont
Untitled #05 (2008) by Richard Dupont

Who would have thought the day would come when your printer could produce a real live gun.

Three-dimensional printers are becoming a staple of many homes, allowing people to print anything from jewelry they can wear to edible ravioli. And as this technology becomes more affordable — some models are already going for under $1,300 — it is only a matter of time before a 3-D printer joins the computer and microwave as just another home appliance.

Now the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City is taking a look at how 3-D printing and other digital fabrication technologies are changing the way artists and designers make. The exhibition, “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” features over 120 works by contemporary artists, architects and designers that were either designed or fabricated using computer-assisted production.

Given the hype that has accompanied such technologies, the collection of objects from 2005 to the present makes the “postdigital” era seem far from groundbreaking, and even familiar. Works such as a white nebulous-looking lamp by Bathsheba Grossman and a red ribbon-shaped rocking chair by Ron Arad will not look out of place at a design retail store. Both were created almost a decade ago and have been available for sale for several years now. It is a reminder that digitally fabricated objects have been in our midst for some time now, and the technology is not so new after all.

Most of the objects assembled across almost three floors of the museum show how the technology has freed artists and designers from the constraints of traditional production techniques. This is playfully suggested in Richard Dupont’s sculpture of himself, whose mirage-like form would take forever to sculpt by hand. The work aptly fronts the exhibition’s publicity materials as an icon of how digital fabrication is re-shaping human life. Another work by Michael Hanseyer demonstrates how intricate digital fabrication can get with a column made from a stack of 2,700 sheets of laser-cut one-millimeter board. However, the work like several others sees the creator give up creative control to the novelty of what digital fabrication offers instead. Rather than create new forms and ways of making, many of the exhibition’s works simply show off how they can outdo current methods of making.

Doudou Necklace by Boucheron (2009). Design by Marc Newson
Doudou Necklace by Boucheron (2009). Design by Marc Newson

A similar wide-eyed fascination with the effects of digital production can also be said of the works in the show that curator Ron Labaco regards to have been inspired by nature and geometrical forms. Marc Newson created a necklace resembling a galaxy of stars that if one did not know its digital origins would simply be seen as an elaborate piece of jewelry design. Similarly, German designers Wertel Oberfell and Matthias Bär simply visualize the mathematical concept of fractals in the form of a broccoli-like chair with a honeycomb top, a design pattern that will look regardless if you create bigger or smaller versions of it. In both these works, and many others in the exhibition, an aesthetic formula for digital fabrication emerges: a complex mosaic of basic geometric units. Considering the different starting points of the works, the lack of diverse forms reflects both the limitations of current digital fabrication technology and how practitioners are using it.

To be sure, some objects produced by 3-D printers may seem ordinary because we’ve already grown used to them. As the wall text explains, “the amazing digital achievements of the last few decades are now taken for granted.” To judge the works only by their aesthetics is to overlook the time and material savings of making in this way. Compared to using the hand or traditional production, digital fabrication techniques are precise and easily controlled via a computer. But this process is not evident as each work is only tagged with the digital production method they are made in. Visitors unfamiliar with them or the history of production will have no sense of how these techniques democratize the process of making.

A small set of more experimental works, however, offers a more tantalizing glimpse of the potential of the digital process. In objects by Anish Kapoor and Jan Habraken, one begins to see how new technologies offer more than just new aesthetics. Kapoor’s set of sculptures resembling real coral rocks blurs the distinction between the creation of nature and something digitally-made, and one is left to wonder what cannot be designed by man anymore? Habraken uses digital fabrication as a kind of biological womb to “breed” the ideal chair out of existing ones. Digital technology allowed him to single out unique elements of chair designs, which he then easily mixed, matched and modified to create something entirely new. This is similar to the desktop publishing revolution over two decades ago when computers allowed people to design and print whatever graphics they wanted.

This freedom to make things will be the lasting impact of digital fabrication and was evident in the exhibition’s works that people spent the most time with. While some got their hands “dirty” sculpting on a virtual pottery wheel by Unfold and Tim Knapen, others made noises or whistled into François Brument’s installation that digitally generated vases whose shape and size varied depending on the kinds of audio input. These works demonstrated how technology was changing the act of making, but the visitors’ creations — pots and vases that simply differed in shapes and sizes — suggest a lot more work is needed in thinking about the possibilities of making with digital fabrication.

The technology is clearly fascinating people given how the most popular feature of the exhibition is a booth sponsored by Shapeways, a 3-D printing company. Visitors can design their own objects on computers provided, and even line up to get scanned and printed for a miniature 3-D self-portrait. This is an apt ending for one of the first exhibitions on a set of technologies that is becoming increasing common in our everyday lives. What better way to introduce it to the masses than by letting them take home their first digitally fabricated product: an image of themselves?

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Written for Robin Pogrebin’s Reporting Tools workshop at D-Crit.