OMI – Open Material Infrastructure

OMI – Open Material Infrastructure is an extended and applied investigation into the world of construction waste and its potentials for Re-use and Urban Mining.

Construction skips are the most visible interface between construction sites and the urban space, serving as a perfect metaphor for the industry‘s material-diarrhoea.
Thereby skips are often the endpoint of neglected and surplus construction material that could still be re-used, but instead gets down-cycled to secondary material, thermally exploited in heat-plants or recycled in metal products.

However there already exist practitioners in the realm of Re-use and Urban Mining, like ‚skip-divers‘ – individuals collecting and using materials found in construction skips.

Inspired by the practice of skip-diving and as a result of the conducted research OMI proposes a twofold approach:
Firstly OMI creates an online platform for the community of local skip-divers and secondly OMI proposes an open online tool called OMI skip finder, a community-generated map to locate current construction skips and make them thereby easier accessible as sources of re-usable materials.

Time

SS 2018

Location

Vienna

Team

Zuzanna Zajac

Raphael Volkmer

David Grüner