For the speculative design manual, I was thinking about creative ways to get rid of plastic wastes in the ocean and came across this marine drone by RanMarine called the WasteShark. This technology operates both as autonomous and remote-control model and performs waste and data collection in ports, harbors and other marine environment.
Read more about WasteShark here.
I found the innovative idea of a robot “shark” removing all the debris from the water to be really interesting. But I also couldn’t help but think about the “design’s inbuilt optimism” mentioned in the Speculative Everything which says how we sometimes try to solve a world problem through our design rather than changing our ideas and behaviors that created the problem in the first place. While technologies like WasteShark are extremely important in removing plastic wastes from the ocean, finding creative ways to reduce/replace plastics usage would be more sustainable for the future.
DSGN 264-402 | Fall 2020 