theory

ESSAY

The research I did started off by briefly looking into the five given topics, salt, water, food, oil and soil. I looked up the examples of projects with these themes named in lesson one. For instance Nienke Hoogvliet’s project Waterschatten about reusing toilet paper and Bas Sala’s smart rain barrels in Rotterdam. I also wrote down all the connotations that came to mind while thinking of the five topics. Water seemed the most interesting to me, so that’s what I continued my research upon.

The first thing I did was listing what came up to me while thinking of the topic water. Examples of this are drinkwater, rainwater, showering water and seawater. I divided these into topics: used for nutritional purposes, for hygienic purposes, recreational purposes and nature. My initial research was pretty broad. I looked into ocean pollution, water drainage systems and experiments on how to purify ditch water. I figured I needed to find something that I could work with from home, so I stuck to focussing on rainwater. I wanted to see how the use of rainwater could be implemented in daily life at home, but found out there wasn’t much to research or to try out further than watering plants and flushing the toilet. I stuck to research about water use in the house, but let go of the idea of rainwater.

I wanted to link my project to actuality and ongoing events, so I looked for news articles to gain new insights on my topic. I found a really useful article about the increase in water use in and around homes during quarantaine.

I decided to build my concept around minimizing water use in quarantaine and link this to the growing problem of water scarcity around the world. To give it a bit of personal impact, I chose to turn these advices into illustrative posters supported by a brief explanation of why and how your change has impact. To come up with different themes to discuss, I paid close attention to a regular day in my quarantined life and write down all the things I did that included the use of water. These are listed down below:

Showering
Brushing teeth
Drinking water
Washing hands
Boiling vegetables
Doing laundry
Doing the dishes
Watering the plants

I wanted to look a bit beyond these obvious actions into ones that are not clearly linked to water use. A guide on saving water published by the Cambridge city council helped me gain insight in this. I found that producing 1 liter gasoline for instance requires 60 liters of water, so it’s way more efficient to travel by bike. I turned my findings into various posters, hopefully encouraging people to adjust their daily habits and collaboratively make a change.