Lunch 19 (Leftovers)

Whether we’re in the kitchen or someone’s in there for us, something’s cooking.

We turn living things into food. Our bodies turn food into energy. Using this energy, we go around all day turning things into other things. We wake up the next day and do it again, and again, until one day our own bodies turn into something else. We like to think of things as stable. When we fashion raw materials into a creation, we don’t like to imagine that someday somebody else will turn it—the thing that we spent so long making—into yet another thing.  But if we free ourselves, just for a moment, from clutching onto the things, we might just be able to see the turning.

This turning is rarely a perfect process. Transformations produce by-products and leave residue. They create leftovers. Like just about everything else we do, the transformational processes of design leave leftovers at every step. We oversee the transformation of a site, materials, and labor into a project. What is left from the site’s previous life? What materials are saved, what are used, and what are lost? What happens when a thing’s originally intended purpose no longer applies? When do the effects of someone’s work spill out of their container?

These questions strike at the heart of active debates within our discipline exactly because they don’t look at things head-on, the way they’re designed to be looked at. In reading design metabolically, we can trace what gets left behind. Only then can we imagine new things—and, more importantly, new processes.