# Water Chats on 2023-02-04

Some topics of discussion on water bricks:
1. If we use the wall sections to store gray-water, there'd be a **utilisation problem**: There'd be too much gray-water generated, that it won't be possible to use it all just by watering plants and flushing toilets. Some potential mitigations of this issue are:
- a) Store only the amount of gray-water that can be re-used. Estimate how much gray-water is required for the domestic space, and build the size of the gray-water tank accordingly. (**@Ramiro** took a stab at estimating this)
- b) Filter the gray-water and put it back to use for all regular domestic uses (except drinking - we discussed that drinking would be too challenging for this phase)
- c) Place the gray-water tanks in places where the water consumption is higher. Such as laundary. This could be the way where our intervention is situated.

2. Assuming we succeed in building the water wall out of our bricks, to be able to enable home use of the wall, these are the challenges we'd need to tackle:
- Design the way to get the used (gray) water into our wall
- Design the filtering mechanism (there are alternative ways of doing this)
- Integrating the filtered water into the system for reuse. The challenge is that it's not possible to just connect it to the pipes of the house. There's pressure in the pipes so water would flow into the tank, not out of it. Plus, it's preferable to know which water is filtered and which is directly coming from the pipe.

We don't have to solve all of these in the master and make it a functional product, but we need to frame our work in such a way that it presents some alternative futures and inspires others.

Another point we discussed was that even if the amount of water saved is not huge, the action of saving and reusing water would trigger a behavioral change that would make people more attentive to their own consumption and induce more water savings and awareness that may go beyond water.

3. In this same thread @Caglar pointed out that we need to position our work as an intervention: We need to think of ways to include other people, expose it to communities, make it usable for others so that it doesn't become a "product design" project but rather a design intervention for emergent futures.

**@all**, let's think about who we can involve and which communities can benefit from our intervention.

4. On "who's interested on what" section, please update the Miro board on what you're interested: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPt5XZBk=/?moveToWidget=3458764544536481037&cot=14

**@all** Feel free to comment there if the rows do not represent your interests well enough.

5. We discussed purchasing this book and sharing the costs with @Ramiro & @Josephine. https://nogridsurvivalprojects.com/book-fb/

**@all** Let's know if you'd like to join the group to share costs and received the eBook.

6. Marc, Çaglar and I stayed longer on Friday and Marc & Caglar were able to print a very first draft trial for the brick. It was just to try printing with clay and see how it works (not representing how it could or should look like at the end), but great that we have started getting hands on.



7. Finally I wrote/brought together the following text (also using some copy from Paige in our teamwork for 1B secs seminar) to explain our project to someone that knows nothing about it. (a contact of Marc who did similar work)

Take a look and feel free to comment or we can later discuss in person. We'll need this type of text for all new introductions, so let's come up with a version we agree with. ;)

> The wall is an ancient invention - at least 12000 years old, as old as the very first cities which was based on a faulty understanding of boundaries. It was an easy mistake to make - without an understanding of the sprawling pattern of life and before the invention of the microscope, many of us did not suspect boundaries could be complex permeable structures full of life, with a spectrum of selective, intelligent openings.
>
> Our collective is trying to rethink the human-made-wall that hasn’t changed much for thousands of years. The question we are asking is: Can we build a modular wall by using water as the main substance that provides isolation and also allows life to flourish within the boundary? Housing plants and other species, allowing the transfer of materials, filtering them where needed, and optimising energy usage by controlling the heat and the flow... Can an invention as simple as water bricks create a more meaningful boundary, that holds up and transmits the wellbeing of all?
>
> In practical and immediate terms, we aim to create clay water bricks that connect to each other in a water-tight way to build larger modules of walls for domestic spaces. By having different sections of walls made of these water tanks, some of them can be utilised as water storage, some for filtering, some as vertical gardens, some for energy transfer...
>
> We would like to come up with the design of the modular system and make it open source to help anyone create such structures in their living spaces. Our hope is that this will benefit water, people, and all other beings in the domestic space.
>
> We would like to meet with you and learn from your experience on designing and building 3d printed bricks for underwater. We guess that you’ve already been solving many of the problems we are yet to face. Thanks in advance for your time.

Have a great week everyone!