Rubber Bands and Raingutter

Before being accepted into the Graduate Industrial Design program at Pratt I enrolled in a continuing ed, Product Design, class. The first assignment was to identify objects that accumulate around the common household and find an alternate use for them so as to delay the time it took for them to reach a landfill. Suggested objects included pop cans, plastic grocery bags and yogurt containers. While all of those have the ability to accumulate quicker than the cookies entering my computer while I write this, the basic materials were not what I was looking for. I asked a few people I knew what collected around their homes and in the end a friend mentioned rubber bands. They are on newspapers, your mail and your produce. They are used to keep cords organized inside packages and lids on fresh soup containers and before you know it you find yourself tempted to make one of those awful rubber band balls found in corporate offices across the country.
So what could I do with this material? It had the ability to offer grip and resilience, there was a color palette although the standard beige was more appealing to me. I started with the ability of this material to offer grip and started thinking of activities that could make use of this quality. The first idea was to make a soap dish. I started by cutting different colored rubber bands into strips and zig zagging them onto a piece of wire. After I had several wires completed I attached them together and headed to my bathroom sink for some product testing. I was shocked. When a wet bar of soap was placed on my soap dish is slid right off. Every bit of grip I counted on my soap dish having was purely in my imagination.
Next I started thinking in terms of repetition and turning this material into a textile. A rug to be specific. I quickly ran to the local craft store and purchased a latch hook kit but instead of using the cheap, brightly colored yarn in the kit I used my supply of rubber bands. My thought was the grip I had lost when the rubber bands were wet would surely return if they were kept dry. This was only partially true. Trying to pull the rubber bands through the latch hook tool was nearly impossible. The rubber band had so much grip it kept sticking to itself resulting in a lot of breakage but once I had it attached to the rug it seemed intent on unhooking itself. While I was learning a lot about this material I thought I was intimately familiar with I was becoming a bit frustrated with the results. Time was running out and I had to have something to present in class that night and finally it came to me. I could string the rubber bands on rain gutter mesh and then tie them to keep them in place. It wouldn't be rug though....it would be a lamp. With only about 2 hours left to complete my project I quickly started to attached the rubber bands to the rain gutter mesh I had formed into a lamp shade. The more I completed the more excited I got. I was able to use all of my failed attempts at working with this material to my advantage. Once I plugged it in I knew I had found a way to greatly increase the life expectancy of this everyday material. (I even managed to get it published.) http://mocoloco.com/archives/004910.php