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Waste Not, Want Not

· 3 min read
Bobby Mawhinney
Bobby Mawhinney
相撲バカ・Vinyl Lover・お神輿担ぎ手・Country Boy ・猫舌 ・ Groove Tube Owner ・ しょうがない!

Down the Red Dot Design Awards rabbit hole again. You know the one. "Five minutes," you tell yourself. Next thing, the coffee's gone cold and you couldn't care less.

My daughter turned 25 this year, an interior designer at IKEA, buying her a present is basically a competitive sport now, she knows her stuff. No pressure, Bobby!

Then I found this. Nothing served it up. No feed, no "you might also like". I went looking, and there it was.

The carafe glowing on a table

The Sonnenglas Light Carafe. Hand-blown from old bottles collected off the streets of Eswatini, where for a lot of folk that collecting is the only income going. The glass gets sorted, shredded, melted down in a furnace that runs on waste cooking oil and solar. Seven people to make one carafe. A whole year of training before you're even allowed near the pipe! And what do you get at the end of all that? A jug that's also a lamp. The little solar light sits in the neck, comes on when you get close, give it a twist to switch off. No buttons. No app. No "firmware update

It doesn't do anything extra. Every bit of it is exactly what's needed and not one thing more. The glass is honest. The light's from the sun. It was rubbish before it was this, and I mean that literally (their phrase is "from waste to elegance", and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it).

What I want, for the stuff I build and, if I'm honest, the way I'm trying to live, is exactly that. Does the job. Does it beautifully. Then stops.

She opened it. "Oh, this is really cool." Interior designer approved. Job done!

So I'm keeping the phrase. Both of them, actually. "From waste to elegance" for the things I make, and the one I've muttered at work for years: make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. Turns out they're the same phrase wearing different coats. Whenever I can't tell if I'm on the right track (a feature, a decision, a whole life direction) I hold it up against the carafe. Does it do the job? Does it stop there? Or is half of it just noise?

Spoiler: most of it's noise.

The carafe is rare.