Juan Montero Valdes

Department: Social Design

Hacking Hope

Step into any home and you can expect an impressive array of household appliances and machines at the ready. Televisions, washing machines, dryers, toasters, computers- countless devices, each with a specific purpose. That’s the very crux of the problem. Often, each machine has only a single use. There it sits, bursting with the latest technology, taking up heaps of space, and all it does is the dishes or your washing.
Juan Montero Valdés can’t bear to see such mass potential go to waste, believing that we can get much more out of our machines. To open our eyes to the boundless possibilities, he has devised numerous imaginative, theoretically feasible uses. “By tapping into existing processes, like the circular motion of a dryer, you could use lint collected from your clothes to spin new socks,” he says. He even suggests that machines can collaborate with each other: “Why not hook your coffee maker up to your printer to feed it with home-made ink?” Hacking Hope aims to create the right frame of mind; cultivating a willingness to question the status quo and to experiment. Instead of being passively reliant on these objects, we can make them do more for us.

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