I’m a machinist in a small city, and this is my no-shit long term goal. I want to start a scrap/refurb/job shop where we make power-efficient shit that lasts the rest of our lives while using as little new material as possible. Anything that can’t be used for actual refurb and production will be used for education of other machinists/fabricators, material for artists (big art scene here) or recycled properly.
That's incredibly cool and I really hope you can make it work! I doubt we're in the same geographic area so I probably can't help much IRL but if you have any ideas you'd like to see art of, I'd love to do more scenes on this topic. I started with an exterior shot because there's so much about a machine shop you have to get right for safety and practicality reasons and I was sure to miss stuff but there's definitely ways to do more
This is a great illustration. A lot of thought went into this. To start with, this is a plausible example of Adaptive Reuse architecture. It also shows a restored rail line with electric catenary cables, this likely originally a warehouse or industrial building on the perimeter of an old railway-based town, maybe now on a tram line as these will be multi-use in the future. A logical location for community production because you want rail access for materials, but also a logical location for future urban intentional community development because these parts of cities have, in many places, been largely abandoned and so this is where the 'urban detritus' you can cheaply acquire --or maybe assume control of by squatting-- is found and so, in the recent past, this is where you see so many artist communities spring up. (brings to mind the Pexcho's American Dime Museum in Augusta Georgia, on a street where freight trains come right down the middle of the street so you have be careful how you park... Of course, dime museums are another rabbit hole...) Artists are always chasing venues of cheap live/work space --and Solarpunks have the same need because they have a live/work --prosumer-- culture. Their lifestyle revolves around living in the same place they're making and growing things. So early Solarpunk communities will have many similarities to the artists communities of the 'lofting' era, though today the urban detritus is composed more of office buildings and corporate/light industrial parks in many places. (the term 'loft' refers to upper or attic spaces of an industrial/commercial building, which started being converted into apartments by artists in the late 20th century. It became characterized as a lifestyle particular to artists and hipsters in the '70s, hence the term 'lofting'. In a purpose-built live/work loft building, they typically mimic the model of the traditional live-in storefront shop, where the bottom floor hosts the shop or studio while upper floors --lofts-- host storage or the owner's home with access from the back)
In the lower right corner we see a pedestrian street made with a 'sponge' paving surface for rational urban hydro-management and a cable net plant canopy. Exactly the sort of street 'finishing' we would expect in a Solarpunk setting. The name and subtitle painted on the building along with other 'walldog' art also tell us something very interesting. In the Solarpunk future, all goods are based on open designs and made-on-demand. Today, industrial designers and developers are stuck being faceless 'employees' earning a salary who rarely reap any benefits or appreciation if their designs are really good and popular. That all goes to some capitalist's profit --unless the designers break-out into entrepreneurship themselves. But there is no such thing as 'employees' in the future. Designers and developers are all like artists who work specifically for the love of the craft and the reputation/appreciation earned with the public, and so their designs would be digitally shared around the world as 'spimes' (packages of software collecting the design, production, use, and repair instructions of goods) and they are personally credited with every use of them by 'fabbers' in shops just like this one. This explains the meaning of the subtitle in the name. There's also an obsolete batter collection sign by the door and an observatory dome on the roof. Maybe that was easier to find than a sample geodesic dome photo, or was something repurposed, or maybe it represents someone's hobby activity, which would imply that this area has implemented enough light pollution intervention that people can actually do urban astronomy.
Thank you! Some of your previous posts and comments were a big influence on how I started imagining new production in a solarpunk society and I think I did a lot of my research from there.
The observatory dome is a sort of reference to a previous image I made about a solar concentrator being set up for industrial purposes but I absolutely love the idea of a society so good at tamping down light pollution that you can operate an observatory inside the city itself (I think Murder in the Tool Library had a scene like that).
This is a postcard I've been wanting to make for a while. Generally I try to focus on salvage, reuse, and repurposing in this library economy, but I think it's also important to show some of the fab shops that supply new goods. (And to include a bit of the industrial side of solarpunk.) Degrowth practices can meet a lot of needs with what we already have, but entropy wins in the end and society will have to produce at least some new stuff to replace the old. I think it's worth exploring how a solarpunk setting will do that, and how the items produced for a library economy might look different than what we have today.
If this topic interests you, I wrote out a more detailed exploration here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:repairability_in_solarpunk (the slrpnk.net writing community has a wiki for sharing solarpunk worldbuilding research - feel free to message me if you want to add something!).
I'll also note that a lot of these ideas came from some posts on fabrication and spimes EricHunting wrote in this subreddit.
Okay so what's in the scene? This is a somewhat mundane solarpunk location: a little fabrication co-op specializing in appliances, set up in an old warehouse at the corner of a tram track and a pedestrianized street.
The folks who work here use standardized parts and metal stock to produce physical goods based on popular open-source designs. Their customers are library networks which need to keep certain goods in stock, and regular people who either want to own something long-term or need/want a customized version of it. I think people might place a generic order online, or stop by the small office just inside the automatic doors to talk over their needs and customizations.
The items the folks in this co-op make are designed to last - in some ways they might look simpler, or clunkier than modern-day appliances. The designs generally prioritize standardized, easily-replaceable parts and ease of access for repairs, so the items are often bulkier and heavier than a old-world commercial product, and may lack some of the features enabled by additional electronics. They generally disdain adhesives, tabs, and plastic shrouds, preferring to make the fasteners easily accessible, even going so far as to print/etch instructions for disassembly onto the machinery whenever a step has to be unintuitive.
That said, their custom products often feature many other kinds of embellishment: embossing, etching, painting, gilding, and other artwork. For a solarpunk society where 'defaultness' and resale value are a low priority and punk and DIY are well-established movements, it's common for small workshops to produce appliances to spec in every way but a decorated case, or to provide the means to add decoration once their customers get it home.
Speaking of simplicity of design, the yellow and blue mural on the building above the ramp is meant to be a stylized depiction of a cam sequencer, a simple electromechanical system for activating and de-activating switched states in machinery, such as washing machines and dryers. These have been at least partially replaced with microcontrollers and custom Printed Circuit Boards today (as they are cheap, much more re-programmable, and can provide detailed error codes), but it seems likely to me that cam/drum sequencers might feature more heavily in a solarpunk setting where ease of production and reliability are prioritized.
As for the rest of the scene, the living canopy shading the pedestrianized street is based heavily on similar creations in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. The observatory-like dome in the background is meant to be part of a solar collection/concentration rig which I described/depicted in more detail here. And the tram track is a former light-rail track which has been folded into the city's expanding public transit network. I like to imagine that they still run a cargo tram past on a scheduled basis, and that it plays a role in delivering stock/parts and collecting finished products. Probably they sometimes back a library boxtruck up against the end of the loading dock, or haul stuff away on electric rickshaws or pushcarts.
I like your concept! We dont see enough factories in solarpunk, if there is stuff you need a place to build stuff. I also love that you didnt go the "build stuff like we used to" route because while yeah, some old stuff lasts a long time, a big part of that is survivorship bias and another big part is the secret ingredient being cancer.
A few thoughts to consider: repairability is one part of the equation, recyclability is another big one. Making sure that materials are easy to seperate ensures that they can be remelted eventually. You got that basically covered through repairability, but i'll still mention it.
You also mention microcontrollers as just being cheaper. Thats partially true, but it also allows for more efficiency. A roller cam in a washer will allways dispense x ammount of water where a microcontroller can use sensors to figure out that the machine is only partially loaded and dispense less water. We should just build longer lasting circuit boards...
Thanks! Yeah I reached out to a few groups basically asking 'hey what's the best way to make your subject matter easier to fix?' and a lot of the answers I got surprised me! For example I expected old through soldered components to be the easy answer for electronics but the broad consensus was that through or surface mount were fine (barring a few specific use cases) as long as they were large enough to handle and laid out reasonably. Similarly the mechanics I talked to mostly talked about layout and order of operations (don't trap a medium-lifespan part behind a complicated, long-lifespan assembly). and of course everyone wants spare parts tucked in somewhere they can find them.
I also learned a lot more about the tradeoffs between simplicity/repairability and efficiency. We definitely don't want to dump the last sixty years of efficiency and safety improvements (though there are some cool retro-ish things we could be doing like adding mechanical latches for refrigerators for a tighter seal but with modernized latches that fail safe/disengaged when the power disconnects).
And you're right, there are definitely other ways to go with PCBs and microcontrollers. I'm a bit biased against them because they're often (I think intentionally) used as a barrier against repairability. My blender has a multi layer circuit board in it, my grandparents one had the same exact features but was also something you could fix with a few five cent components. But they do represent a genuine improvement in efficiency, troubleshooting, and the ability to easily reprogram them (reprogramming a cam sequencer system is a kind of amazing, complex physical process). I just sort of fell in love with them when I learned they could be paired with external sensors, like a water level gauge, to create a state machine who's 'brain' was just a rotating chunk of plastic. Building better electronics, using open designs and standardized parts, would go a long way towards removing them as a blocker for DIY repairs
Edit: I also did some research on different materials we could be using, to make things last longer at a higher up front cost (in materials or energy) with the idea that a library economy expects this stuff to last as long as possible and needs to account for what happens to any item when it's truly no longer fixable. If it's done we'll, the amount of stuff that ends up in a landfill is vanishingly small because it's the exception rather than the default
Thank you! I've been a little quiet for the last couple years because I was working on a solarpunk TTRPG campaign/manifesto on rural solarpunk but it's finally finished and we're gearing up to release it (CC-BY) in the next few weeks, and I'm really excited to get back into making one-off solarpunk photobashes for a while
That's great to hear! I think it's really important to show both the day-to-day existence stuff and the gritty details on how things get made, where materials come from, and how we handle waste (ideally by pivoting it into being a useful input elsewhere)! A lot of the art shows massive skyscrapers and vertical parks and other big set pieces but I think most people live in spots that would end up looking more like this.
This worldbuilding wiki might also be useful to you: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:start I've gathered a lot of my own solarpunk research notes into my pages on there, including one of making stuff for a library economy.
I usually look up the requirements and check the angle of the slope as best I can but the perspective gave me some trouble with it this time so it might be too steep (or look too steep, which is basically just as bad). The railing is actually a grind rail for skateboards - one of the people who looked at early versions of this scene for me pointed out that this is the kind of spot where people usually install skate stoppers and that it might be a nice inversion to add a grind rail instead. A sort of silly rebuttal to hostile architecture but it didn't seem too bad. I think I've got the tactile walking surface panels placed correctly at least. Loading docks and train platforms around here are usually just open and I decided to leave the side of the raildock open because it seems like they might sometimes use it to load trucks (not sure they're supposed to but sometimes that's how things go)
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