Author: Merel Karhof
Cul-de-sac / dead end / no exit
While I was trying to walk in a straight line from the Royal College of Art towards Kensington Olympia, I was confronted with lots of Cul de sacs. Interesting to me was the way the wind blows in and out these spaces, unlike in normal streets where the wind blows only in one direction.
Looking at this phenomenon, I set myself the brief to use this ‘free’ energy source and create a product with it.
I created a mechanical wind powered knitting machine, which knits fast when there is a lot of wind and slow when there is not a lot of wind.
For my final show I present the machine as small wind knitting factory that illustrates a small production process from outside college, inside college. This visualizes directly what you can produce with the present amount of wind. The yarn will be knitted outside and enter the college trough the window as a long scarf. Inside there will be a small shop with me in it creating products with the harvested wool.
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Windmill Collection
These are examples of a urban windmills, an urban windmill can catch the wind from each different direction, without having to move towards the wind.
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Making the wind visible with paper windmills
harvesting the small amounts of energy
Wind creating a product
Making the energy you produce as a human, while you walk, visible with a windmill brooch
Performance South-Kensington, London.
Wind creating a product
the first products
wind knitting factory on an empty facade in London
This is a mockup from the machine like it will look. The mill functions as energy collector but at the same time it will be the signboard of my wind knitting shop.
Since the wind knitting machine can not change yarn, I’m trying to design a yarn which has more colors on it, which will create a pattern on the scarf.
