The waste and the digital: End-of-life materials and digital procedures as an opportunity for architectural sustainable development

Globally, almost all economic systems rely on the consumption of natural resources to produce economic output and fabricate large amounts of waste as a result. While the system itself seems effective, it causes deep environmental burdens to our habitat, and, most importantly, disrupts social integrity and sustainability. The byproduct of our system in this case waste has been a resource that has largely been disregarded. Digital tools on the other hand have shown great presented and equipped architects and designers with methods of design and fabrication which greatly expand on their capabilities. The shift in architectural design of designing the process instead of the final product opens implications for other fields as well. The ability to share these processes and directly translate designs to physical products greatly enhances the means of architectural production beyond what was capable of before. Digital tools in this sense, through a meticulously designed process, have the means to direct and create methods that transform products at the end-of-life into valuable resources for design and building. The main aim of this thesis is exactly exploring and understanding procedures based on digital tools that are able to activate and transform products at the end of their life cycle into valuable, cheap, and available resources for sustainable construction methods. Aside from just the problem of how to transform waste, this thesis also deals with issues of fabrication and open-source design, and the implications they can have on a process of design and production that is based on waste as a resource. The practice-based approach used by the thesis is represented by a series of experiments, workshops, and design class works that each inform parts of the procedure. The final outcome of the thesis is represented as a set of procedures that designing with materials at the end-of-life can have, where processes need to part of a feedback loop of material, where the outcome of one design can become the input for the next one.