Curbside salvage, trash-picking, junking, dumpster-diving. Whatever you call it, the process of reusing discarded objects (aka Mongo) has become such a norm in NYC, modern furniture design company BluDot is basing a marketing experiment around the act of salvage.

Blu Dot placed twenty-five of their “Real Good Chairs” in random locations throughout New York city, free for the taking, hoping to gain insight into New York’s curb-picking culture by tracking the chairs with GPS, documenting the chair’s journeys on Twitter and Flickr. I like everything about this: the chairs, the project itself, the use of social media, and the project as a marketing effort. Blu Dot plans to follow the chairs to their new homes and release a documentary about the project in December as they celebrate their SoHo showroom’s fifth anniversary.

Via.

I was confronted the other day by this image of a prosthetic seat for a broken chair. It made me think about all the broken things I’d tossed out or seen tossed out over the years and what a waste that was. Waste is a real concern of mine lately, both from a design ethics standpoint and an economic one.

Most consumer goods today are so cheap that repairing them hardly seems worth it. Things move so fast that there is inevitably something new and improved to replace it. The new thing is bound to be cheaply made, as well. The cycle repeats itself.

In a way, I suppose, these broken things help fuel the economic engine. People keep buying replacements and designers keep making them. This is, of course, terrible because it’s a tremendous waste of resources.

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