Thanks!! I’ve really come to enjoy reexamining old technologies and ways of doing things to see if they make sense in a society with different priorities (reducing harm, rather than extracting profits) and with modern technology available to augment/improve them.
Yeah it loses a bit for my wanting to have everything, (inside and out) in one shot. My attention span is an intense but fickle thing and there’s always a risk I’ll just drop a project halfway through and work on something else for a few months, so I’ve been trying to jam as many ideas as possible into each of these pictures because I don’t know when I’ll revisit each concept - plus they take multiple days to make as-is. Wanting to show the solar reflector and solar water heater meant it was easier to stage the scene from the outside looking in, but a more full shot of the kitchen would have worked better from inside. There’s a reason those old ‘kitchen of the future’ advertisements were all indoors. At this point I’m kind of going for breadth more than depth, and once I’ve got one version of everything on the list, I’ll hopefully come back and dial in on specifics.
I finished the poured concrete 45° blocks for my neighbor’s raised bed. I’ll post pictures soon, though it isn’t terribly nice looking since the local rabbits got to the new flowers before I could get a picture (they’re perennials so they’ll be back next year).
About an hour ago I ‘fixed’ our washing machine - the lid switch failed yesterday, which prevented it from draining. Great design btw. I disconnected it, and added a jumper made from lampwire so it thinks the lid is always closed. That let us finish the laundry and skip hiring a repair company. I could get a replacement switch online but I don’t really see the need, it’ll just break again someday and I don’t feel like the marginal safety benefit is worth it. Just leave the lid closed while it’s running.
I think you’re going to like this design! I made the south wall and part of the roof kind of a greenhouse glass structure, lined with shelves of herbs! And some other plants. I think I’m getting near the end of this photobash - most of the big elements are in place, I’m mostly just hunting up all the kitchen clutter to fill the shelves and counters, and then I can start the details stage, where I make all the little tweaks and recoloring to geet the light right. I was hoping to finish today but it’ll probably be Monday
This is really interesting, I’ve got some mushroom cultivation to read about! Cold and damp is an interesting feature set to look for in part of a building - damp is usually a bad deal for buildings around here (lots of wood and sheetrock). In places that could use quanats and wind towers for cooling, that might be a good fit? Or I wonder if it could be paired with a greenhouse as they’re also damp, and cooling one space could warm the other with waste heat? Probably wouldn’t need both at once though, so that might be out.
Very cool idea! That seems like an easy thing to add and fermented foods are a great addition. I also like the mushroom idea and will add it to my list for future scenes!
Thanks!! I figure solarpunk societies should be very consensus-driven, so these depictions of them should be too! Folks here have some awesome ideas! Plus it’ll hopefully be good discussions, and worldbuilding fodder
Good luck with your writing! All my attempts at solarpunk come out a bit too postapocalyptic right now but I think I’m getting closer as I work on these pictures. I think we need more solutions-focussed scifi and art to help get people thinking about other ways life could be done. Seeing it demonstrated, even in fiction, really helps I think
A root cellar is a great fit for the design I’m thinking of - if we’re already building an addition for this summer kitchen, the space underneath is a great spot for a root cellar!
I’d been wondering if an icebox is reaching back too far or too much of a stretch for modern audiences - I grew up listening to stories from my grandparents about harvesting ice in the winters (the winter crop) and storing it under sawdust (and getting in trouble for hiding in the ice house on hot days). I also got to help with an ice harvest recreation at a farm museum for a few years. I’m fond of the concept but wonder if easier technologies can be done ‘greenly’ enough that people wouldn’t see it as a worthwhile alternative (whether that’s PV panels and a battery powering a chest freezer (or chest fridge) or perhaps something like RoboGroMo’s idea to replace the propane heat component of an RV fridge with a solar concentrator. Like I’ve mentioned, I like reexamining older technologies to see if they’d be a good fit for a society with different priorities, modern technology to augment it, and possibly fewer resources overall. If it seems practical enough I’m happy to include it!
I can see the emphasis on local food, and shorter distances enabling more frequent trips to a market (while at the same time preserving more food in alternative ways) though I’m not sure yet how to show it in the same scene. Thanks for your suggestions!
Thanks! Those pedal powered designs actually seem pretty practical! They remind me of a grinding wheel my dad used to use to sharpen knives and axes - I was always amazed at how well it worked for the minimal effort of the pedal.
Thank you for giving me the right words to describe seasonality! - and the scope of impacts on your life. I’ve been thinking that a properly solarpunk society is going to have a lot of cultural differences from modern life, originally I’d been thinking mostly a different pace, with less desperate urgency in all tasks, less emphasis on always finding another way to make money because money means safety and stability and basic dignity. But I think it’d probably be a lot more than that, and I think adjusting our lives to the seasons (where applicable) would be a big part of that - and part of what would make solarpunk cultures extremely varied and unique to their immediate surroundings. Wonderful world building potential in seeing how location, weather, and the existing resources, like infrastructure, technology, and reusable parts, shape each community.
Very much agreed! There’s a great section in Ecotopia about their appliances being uglier than American ones, but way more repairable, using common, compatible parts and simple construction. They didn’t allow products to go to market unless a volunteer committee of regular people with common tools were able to fix the most likely issues. I think a lot about how different the power tools I’ve inherited from my grandfather (with their external, standard-dimension motors and fairly open frames), are from say our washer and dryer, where everything is packed tightly into a sleek-looking shell. If my drill press motor ever goes, I can replace it with one from any local hardware store - if something goes wrong with my dryer, it’ll take a lot more research, careful disassembly, and I might need to call a specialist. Same for small appliances - why is there a Printed Circuit Board in my blender, which works exactly as well as my grandmother’s blender from the 1960s, which I could fix with patience, a soldering iron, and a multimeter?
I’ll have to look at older appliance catalogues and see if I can find any designs that make repairability visually clear - thanks!
A solarpunk society is going to have many of the conflicts any human civilization tends to see. By working on fundamental inequalities and striving to provide safety nets and stability, we can remove a lot of motivations for crimes, but there’ll always be people who’ll try to cheat others, take harmful shortcuts, or commit crimes for reasons other than necessity. Serial killers spring to mind. Even within a fairly equal society you may have people who feel they could have had more, that they’ve been cheated out of a birthright of capitalist millionaire-hood or some good-old-days existence, real or imagined
How do you handle law enforcement, how do you contain genuinely dangerous people?
There’ll also be groups outside solarpunk communities. People who ascribe to old world values, who prioritize extraction and hoarding of resources, who push their externalities like waste onto others or their environment. They might be upstream, poisoning your water. Personally I see it as a fairly postapocalyptic setting, focused mostly on people rebuilding in a more thoughtful, deliberate, and inclusive way, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to say bandits and accelerationist survivalists will still be around on the fringes. Perhaps someone wants what you’ve built and they don’t want to share it with you, perhaps they disagree with the entire premise of your society and want it to stop existing.
How do you negotiate with these people? How do you work out some kind of arrangement that improves things? Can you avoid violence when the other people glorify it?
Even if you don’t think that stuff fits, that it’s not utopian enough, any community will be plagued with conflicts over the best way to accomplish something, even if most members agree overall on the goals. Environmental movements are full of disagreements over which tradeoffs to accept.
Here’s an example from something I’ve been thinking about recently: society needs a certain amount of steel and concrete, especially when rebuilding. You can reduce the overall amount, but that has other tradeoffs, you might need to harvest more lumber, deforesting certain areas, or cut back on housing or civil services, worsening peoples’ lives. Or you meet the required amounts - steel and concrete both take tremendous amounts of heat to produce. Your community could build a solar furnace using a ton of pivoting mirrors, and a parabolic concentrator, or a traditional fired furnace/kiln. The former will cover much more land, destroying habitats, and any birds who cross through the solar flux. The traditional system will produce lots of CO2 and other pollutants, and require fuel whose extraction process also damages habitats and will cost money or trade goods for as long as it runs. This kind of conflict is almost worse because most people involved want to do the right thing and have considered the options, they just prioritize different aspects of the problem.
Photobashes are kind of digital collages with the goal of making a specific scene out of chopped-up photographs and textures, often mixing in a lot of painting.
I start with a sketch, then start scrounging up images that fit my goal. If I’m doing line art, I trace or convert each piece to lines before working with it, if I’m going for something like a render, I find relevant textures and use them to sort of clad the sketch, slowly building a scene.
I’ve been playing with a few styles from renders to line art comics; the level of realism tends to determine the amount of time it takes.
I’m not sure that I can help with play testing but if you want any more art, I’m already working on solarpunk photobashes and releasing them CC-BY so if you need any scenes you can’t find, let me know and I’ll add them to the to-do list.
I’ve tried posting the image as a response to this comment (I’m guessing you don’t want to turn off noscript or whichever adblocker you’re running) but it won’t upload, possibly because this thread is on lemmy.ml? The good news is I’ve also uploaded it to a few other places: