Open Industrial Process

Open System, ecology, people, sustainable

I had a nice talk with Gino Bistagnino, President of Studies in Industrial Design, Politecnic of Turin, and member of the scientific advisory board and professor of the System Design Master in Politecnico of Torino (created in collaboration with Zeri.org), which with grate willingness talked about the open industrial process.

Beginning from the five nature kingdoms, bacterias, seaweeds, mushrooms, plants and animals, the professor remindes how “neither of these different kingdoms recuperates their proper waists, thow will become an input for another kingdom”. Professor Bistagnino’s lessons deals with products wich are inserted in an open industrial process:

GB: where the product is no longer the focus, because we would therefore not consider the waist, but mankind, as producer and consumer of the product, is always at the center. If there is willing that each product has less waist, it is necessary to focus on mankind. Every thing changes if our focus moves from product to mankind. If the industrial production has his interests in the output as well, and doesn’t reason linearly thinking only at his product, it’s possible to tend at Zero emission. This method is called open system wich is the opposite of the core business: a new production system from where comes out products belonging to an open system.

GB: The focus on the product only will bring leftovers, wich will be diminuate at maximum but will not be eliminated, for doing so it will be necessary that they become a resources for another system. Our production system is linear, while the Earth productive system is systemic, where all the excesses are methabolized by the system itself: there are no waists. In the world there is a logic far more complexe and intelligent. For example the ceramic that we produce is given by a very precise combination of temperature and pressure…and what about the oyster, that under water produces a similar material at ambient temperature? We must copy and imitate productivity systems from the nature.
For this matter we have inaugurated in Turin the only lectures on System Design in the world, wich intends to promote this kind of open production system. For example now we are dealing with the ‘Salone del Gusto‘of next year, which we are preparing a circle production that will minimize the waste, at the same way we have worked for the Frejus tunnel, where the problem was to eliminate the extracted rocks full of silicon, we thought it could be usefull for the fertilization for rice cultivation, therefore use a natural fertilizator rather than a synthetic one.

LB: So it seems there are more possibilities in a industrial open process?
GB: There many paths that we can take in nature to produce something.
Generally we are used to consider innovation as a substitute of technology, I think that to innovates means to bring the innovations in a system, wich means that the problematics must be considered on a different point of vew, there is no need of a new technology but a new system of thinking. It depends on mankind not in technology.

For example, in our lectures of studies we use Blender, a 3d Open Source programme, as a challange it works perfectly, and we are also pushing the community of developers to make Blender become a real CAD software.

The core business concept is tied to linearity and while the new business model consideres waste as a increaser of the cach flow: the waste of the butching industries of a city of 100.000 habitants costs to the comunity 1.500.000 euro per year to dismantle it, but if this wastes are razionalized is possible to generate biogas, for fish nutrition, and to eliminate pesticides in forage. After calculations we have ended with a profit of 450.000 euro.

In medicine we use anthybyotics, a real bomb for all bacterias, but it doesn’t solve the problem, since it destroys every thing we are than obliged to ingere enzimes and bacterias to restore a correct interior equilbrium.

ECO:But is it the return of a new Humanism?
Well, yes, effectivelly what is your more important value? Your biological life is your most important value, followed by society necessary to instaure a cultural and ethic layer. If your focus is the product how can we have the perception of the enviroment, only when the product brakes, when it dies you percieve it’s value.The biological life is the biggest value and therefore the title of our lectures is: man at the center of the project.

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Luca @ July 3, 2007