Design Graduates 2006: Domesticating Dirt by Sam Hulbert
by Petz Scholtus, Barcelona, Spain on 06.23.06
After YouMake creative eco learning kits, here’s another peculiar project from the Goldsmiths College Design degree show this year. Sam Hulbert is Domesticating Dirt! He’s 'exploring ways in which inhabitants and dirt can live together in greater harmony in the domestic environment’ in order to make cleaning more pleasurable and satisfying. If you’re curious now, try Blooming Dirt and you won’t have to throw way the dirt collected in vacuum cleaners anymore. Instead you use it to grow plants! If that’s too radical, how about some Dust Bunny & Friends? They comment on how ornaments just sit and accumulate dust in our homes. These ones are made from recycled household dirt that ones landed on surfaces around the house. To get your dirt blooming, contact ::Sam Hulbert ::Goldsmiths Design
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Those dust bunnies are of course completely un-treehugger tchotchkes. Do they in anyway promote decreased consumption? No, it's just another hunk of plastic to buy and one day throw out.
Oh dear Jared, there’s really no need to be so narrow minded. Products can be designed to provoke thought about the way we regard things in our everyday lives and make us think differently - changing our mind set. I think this project is a great example of this - it clearly comments on how we throw away a resource that can actually be used to grow plants in or be used as a construction material. It is also interesting that these ornaments help to make us less paranoid about dust in the home. There is a lot of research to suggest that over-cleaning
(due to our fear and hatred of household dirt) is actually harming our immune systems. An
object that helps us to live with dust in a subtle domesticated way is very clever. It also gives value to our dirt, dispelling the misconception that it is repulsive and disgusting. So this is by all means an ecological project, but just not in an obviously conventional way. I say hats off to this graduate, and let’s hope he inspires more budding designers towards a more treehugging way of thinking! So why not get off the backs of graduates like these and be more encouraging towards them (they are the future of green design, after all!), and leave the shallow and functional design to Linda Barker and “Changing Rooms”?