Alternative agreements through making: What is wasted now?

When Italo Calvino takes out his rubbish, his family's leftovers are transferred, firstly to the small kitchen poubelle, then onwards to the large poubelle agréée outside. It is an agreement entered into, through the practice of 'correct' disposal, that not only maintains their civic role, but designs the life of Calvino and his family in particular ways. As Calvino notes: "the gesture of throwing away is the first and indispensable condition of being, since one is what one does not throw away" (Calvino 2009, 72). Calvino's account of how his own, and associated lifeworlds, are shaped by waste disposal aligns with Tony Fry's conviction that "design designs" (Fry 2009, 34) - that "we live amid, create and are created by, the designing of the designed as we design" (Fry 2012, 161). Waste management systems, such that Calvino relates, are designed into our lives - and design us - as easy, customary practices, however many other alternatives exist. One example is the practice of the late Marjorie Bligh, a 'housewife superstar', who pursued a lifelong, personal aim to convert all of her 'waste' through craft, feeling the "need to do something - anything - with all that waste" (Wood 2011, 171). This alternative to conventional waste management has been explored through a series of practice-based research projects. Situated in an everyday, domestic environment, the using of the materials that make waste, and the rearranging of this waste through craftbased making merge. An emergent practice evolves that both emanates from and enriches the researcher's fashion design-based skills. What would be wasted is instead used through making, but more significant is the different kinds of agreements that the researcher is committed to through these practices of useful making. What might the ultimate usefulness of all this using through making be?