Sustainability Research

Mixology Corner

As the world evolves and people face unforeseen circumstances, socializing and collaborative thinking allow humans to cope with difficult situations. Due to the 2020 global pandemic, people across the world were advised to quarantine, wear facial coverings and maintain a physical distance from each other. Studies reported that Covid-19 along with quarantine resulted in an increase of mental health issues in the population. Some of these negative psychological effects include; post-traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, depression, infection fears, and stress of uncertainty. Though the pandemic is far from over with its lingering effects and people continuing to get infected every day, there is some optimism towards returning to everyday life. As the world population gets vaccinated and people learn to protect themselves, returning to the ways of a pre-pandemic society is at the forefront of many people's minds. Social Sustainability is defined as supporting the current needs of people and cultures without compromising the ability of future generations to support their needs. The post-Pandemic design focuses on bringing people together in a sustainable and healthy way. At-home bars and bar carts are a way to promote socialization back into the American home, as people invite friends and family to sit around while the host mixes drinks, exchange stories, and new ideas all while sharing drinks. The Mixology Corner is post-pandemic furniture that comes to life as people interact with it and within each other.

During the Victorian era, new kinds of furniture were introduced and soon formed part of every fashionable woman's home. The Tea Trolley was an essential part of decor and routine for the Victorian woman. Taking tea was a crucial part of social invitations. In upper-class homes, maids would roll out these tea trolleys that carried everything needed to make tea, along with biscuits where the host could pour all the components together and hand it to the guest. These carts belonged to women during a time where it was believed that a woman's proper and only place was to be within a household environment. Victorian women were expected to marry, have children, and maintain a nice household. Women gathered around this elegant, mahogany cart during tea time, socializing as their corsets rearranged the anatomy of their bodies, and the arsenic veils they were expected to wear slowly poisoned them. As the 1900s began, the tea trolley continued to be used widely in homes and social gatherings. From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition occurred. The United States had a constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. Those 13 years of secretive alcohol consumption sparked ideas in people to replace the tea trolley, and women began perceiving tea time as antiquated. This marked the end of the tea trolley era and the birth of the cocktail cart.

The cocktail cart had a very slow start and was not a popular item in its beginnings. This was because during the 1930s, immaterial furniture and alcohol were a luxury most could not afford. In 1937, the cocktail cart made an appearance on the big screen serving spiked eggnog to Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in ​The Awful Truth. Because of the Great Depression, the cocktail cart was a luxury that, for the mainstream audience, could only be experienced through movies but enjoyed by wealthy social circles and famous movie stars. In the 1940s and early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of men were deployed overseas to fight in both World War II and the Korean War, while women had to stay back and take over certain jobs in helping the war efforts. This marked continuous decades of hardships for American Families. In 1953, the fighting came to an end and brought a new era of peace and prosperity. The economy was climbing and Americans were ready to celebrate paving the way for the popularization of the bar cart in homes. During the mid-century, the rise of the American middle class brought in-home cocktail parties to the suburbs as well as the utilitarian office bar carts where a man could pour himself a drink. The bar cart was a vital part of domestic entertainment. In a hetero household of the 1950s, that space belonged to housewives. A mid-century housewife had a performative ritual with the bar cart: It was her tool kit for the perfect party, and having those items on hand as well as an aesthetic presentation was essential. Today's bar carts still have performative aspects, but women’s role and the socio-cultural landscape has shifted. The performative action is now an experience that the host, regardless of gender, is in charge of. 

The Mixology Corner is an at-home bar space developed to promote and encourage entertainment and become the contemporary social hearth of the home. While not the most space-efficient item for tiny NYC apartments, this bar allows people across the country to decorate their homes with an aesthetically different yet adaptable piece of furniture that turns into an event when it is being used. The Mixology Corner is composed of parallel lines, planes, and volumes to create a three-dimensional visually pleasing design. This piece is asymmetrically enhanced by the repetition of shapes that brings balance to the eye. When researching at-home bars or bar carts, one typically runs into certain critiques of the existing products on the market. At home bars are typically built-in and have to be created to fit a specific space, while bar carts are considered outdated, they are meant to display expensive liquor, but are not practical for actually preparing and serving drinks. The exposed alcohol and glass could create an unsafe environment for children or pets in the home and when hosting others, one will usually opt to create drinks in the kitchen as there is more space. The Mixology Corner allows for the entertainer to style the bar in a way that is most practical for the individual. The interior storage space provides everything necessary to create these drinks, the expandable bar top makes more space for people to gather, and the pull-out table gives the host the opportunity to mix cocktails without getting in the way of the guests.

  This at-home bar is designed to live in social people's houses. People aged 25-45 years old or anyone who enjoys social gatherings and has space to house this object. Initially, this object remains closed with the components organized and stored away out of sight. When closed, It can be used as a countertop to enjoy a morning coffee or to place decorative objects. The bar countertop extends seamlessly and easily, allowing more people to sit around the bar and be a part of the moment. Not only it brings minds together and often spark great ideas, but also promotes overall mental health and balanced life. While it is important to have a routine in life, disrupting routine is equally necessary. Socializing is good for the mind and body. Gathering with others averts feelings of loneliness, helps sharpen memory and cognitive skills, as well as increases your sense of happiness and overall well-being. This design encourages moderate consumption of Alcohol and mixology as a way to bring people to the present moment and allow those attending to feel less anxious and increase happiness. “A study published in Psychological Science supports this theory. Researchers noted that alcohol increased social bonding among strangers randomly assigned to groups of three. The alcohol drinkers were more engaged than those drinking nonalcoholic beverages in discussions. The social drinkers were also more likely to involve everyone in these conversations.”  

Generally, bars, whether at home or not, produce a lot of waste that ends up in landfills. Typically, when hosting a larger number of people the host tends to bring out the plastic cups and in a typical college setting, endless red solo cups are the standard. The Mixology Corner is designed to guide the user in a less wasteful direction when using this at-home bar. When researching how to run a sustainable bar, there are certain straightforward answers such as reducing the plastic and paper used to serve drinks or buying more at once in order to avoid getting in a car to go purchase more. The Mixology corner has a composting bin in it that allows the host to collect old lemons, limes, and other fruits that could be compostable and a guide to separate what is true waste, what can be recycled, what is compostable, as well as how to efficiently and easily compost. Not only does composting allow for soil and greenery to grow stronger and healthier, but it reduces the waste that is being discarded. Cork is a beautiful material that is often discarded by bars once a bottle is open. The Mixology corner incorporates corks into its design. By partnering with companies such as re-cork, people are able to send corks collected in the designated bin to be processed into new items as well as back into this furniture piece.  

The Mixology Corner is a durable design made out of Baltic Birch Plywood sourced from lenoble lumber which is in Long Island City. Baltic Birch plywood is a material that has a lot of environmental impacts compared to other non-manufactured woods. There are a few reasons as to why this bar is made using plywood. The first reason is that plywood tends to be a more affordable wood. This keeps the price point of the item lower and allows for it to reach more people. Hardwoods are more expensive and harder to find which means that the piece of furniture becomes more of a luxury object in wealthy people's homes. The second reason is because of the way it is manufactured. The grains of the layered woods are placed in opposite directions, which does not allow for grain expansion. When designing and building furniture, one must usually engineer and design in a way that keeps in mind the grain expansion of wood as it expands and contracts with the changes in weather. The third reason is that plywood can come in large 4’ x 8’ ft sheets, allowing one to use single large portions without having to laminate or put pieces of hardwood together. 

The wood used for this bar from Lenoble Lumber is FSC certified and generally a good start when attempting to get material that is properly sourced. Birch trees are an abundant and fast-growing species that cause little devastation or destruction of biodiversity when cut down.  By using plywood as opposed to hardwoods, this design allows a combination of woods instead of using an entire species. Because of the rotatory cutting that is done when manufacturing plywood, there is not a lot of material waste which is one good thing about this manufacturing process. The main issue with using plywood in this design as seen in Figure A below is that plywood manufacturing and transportation of it has a large environmental impact. The human health category is of the biggest concern, with the largest portion being the non-carcinogens (82.77%) of the impact that is emitted by this process. Often when extracting natural resources, one omits the repercussions of taking so much from the environment. The process of manufacturing this wood is strenuous and requires a lot of energy as well as uses certain materials as binding and adhesives such as resins which are derived from the oil and gas industry. While getting rid of plywood in many industries would cause a large disruption in costs and accessibility of products e.g. the cabinet industry, there are ways to reduce the impact as designers and manufacturers of products. The solution is not to brand plywood “unsustainable” and never use it again. For the design of the Mixology corner, I found that re-designing a few components, eliminating unnecessary elements, and reducing the amount of wood used in this design reduced the environmental impact significantly, as seen below in Figure B. When deciding which woods to use in a furniture product, it is necessary to understand the impact at the early stage of design. By ordering an exact amount of wood and making the cuts purposefully fit in a section of the original sheet one not only reduces the waste created by the actual design but also avoids the transportation of extra material that will then be discarded. The expandable countertop is achieved using wooden extension slides and the overall piece has limited metal hardware. The use of the baltic birch plywood gives the bar durability and therefore the opportunity to have an optimized lifetime, allowing for this piece to be used throughout multiple generations. Considering the globalized and evolving times with people constantly moving homes, this bar is designed to be separated into different parts. Some parts nest into each other and some lay flat to reduce the amount of space that will take up for transportation, allowing the user to easily take it apart and assemble it in case of relocation. This ensures that the bar will not get discarded after a couple of years as it becomes an object that can be transported in a regular-sized car. By breaking down this design into more compact forms, there is less space taken up during the shipment and therefore reducing the carbon footprint of this object. 

While there is a long way to go for the Mixology Cart to be a more sustainable product in production, this object is designed for its optimized lifetime. After reading Aluminum Upcycled by Carl Zimrig, I was enlightened in ways and strategies to advance the design to the next level. During a point in the text, there is mention of Dieter Rams and his philosophy that good design is conscious design. After this semester, this is something that I fully agree with. Charles and Ray Eames are arguably some of the most famous industrial designers who used a variety of materials in order to advance their projects and the design industry. After WWII, the Eames noticed that there was an excess of aluminum that provided them the opportunity to use this material in their Aluminum group designs. While these designs were not the most sustainable designs and included a variety of other metals, plastics, and materials in the final forms, they paved the way for something much larger. The Aluminum upcycled text describes how these revolutionary designs and use of materials opened up the opportunity for the use of Aluminum across industries. Not only is there money to be made in recycling, but it reduces the environmental impact of the object drastically as one is giving something a second life and not having to account for its prior life. 

In future iterations of this design, there could be a large reduction of the material used for this product as well as redesigning in order to discard hardware and get rid of new plywood. The majority of it could be used out of recycled wood or discarded furniture pieces. By going through the streets of New York and finding furniture made using plywood that has been disposed of, this bar will give the wood a second life. In future iterations, it could also be interesting to partner with cabinet makers and use some of their scraps of plywood. While there is an improvement to be made with this design, there are some elements of this project that will remain through its future forms of it. With objects no longer being passed down through generations but rather acquired for a limited amount of time and then discarded into landfills. It is important to consider an object's life cycle when designing and keep in mind that the user is not likely to want to fix an item once it’s broken. Being that furniture typically takes up a lot of space it is important to design in ways that will allow for the design to be durable, using sustainably sourced materials as well as making it spatially efficient and easily transportable. Prior to this semester, I had a surface-level knowledge of sustainability in daily life and had no real knowledge as to how I could create designs with less environmental impact. While the Mixology Corner has a large environmental impact and many flaws, I am hoping to take everything I learned this semester and apply it to future iterations of this furniture piece, as well as any future designs I might create. I have now realized that there is no universal solution to creating sustainable design but rather a combination of the right materials for the right purpose that addresses the issue. The mixology Cart is able to be assembled and disassembled many times in order for the user to be able to move it, evolve with it, and form a bond with this object. The Rounded edges of the design, and the opportunity to conceal alcohol if necessary, makes this a family-friendly object that can exist in many different kinds of spaces adding optimism to a home. Considering the history of the tea trolley as a symbol of female oppression in the Victorian era, and the cocktail cart in the 1950s as a symbol of women's liberation, the Mixology cart is intended to surpass gender norms and not conform with societal biases. This object is designed to promote social sustainability. It is meant for all kinds of people to enjoy regardless of any differences or similarities, bringing people together once again.

Citations

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