Wino

My parents are big wine drinkers. I mean, it's usually one bottle a day or a little more. They just enjoy their wine. They also have difficulty throwing things away. My mom will try anything to get a piece of junk overgrown with leaves and vines in our garden. She likes the look.

So at the end of the day, they've collected years' worth of wine corks. My parents say 2-3 years' worth, though I suspect it's more. I'm always looking for an art project, and the wine cork in quantity presents a unique opportunity for "upcycling," sustainable design, aesthetic design, and what the Eames' called "honest use."

This is what came of these wine corks: a table I call the Wino:

The Wino

There are many aspects to the Wino, but the centerpiece is the flat table top made from hundreds of wine corks. I think of the table top as a series of tree-rings, detailing the last two years of my parents' spirit consumption. The occasional tequila and champagne cork tops add some flair.

The table has a wonderful wine aroma. As a note, around 70% of the corks are Charles Shaw.

The Wino is one of my first attempts at presenting recycling, honest use, and sustainable design in an aesthetically pleasing way. The table is made entirely (with the exception of the clear top) of existing materials.

Chair legs with the pegs cut away.

My table legs were actually part of a chair I found at Urban Ore, a salvage yard, in Berkeley. I was drawn to the color of the American Walnut wood, but the chair held more surprises, including the key to making the Wino without nails and using the wine corks themselves to hold everything together.

At UC Berkeley as part of the design group Berkeley Innovation, learning human-centered design in ME110 and with the aid of the Berkeley Institute of Design, I have learned to focus on process. A process which involves user-needs research, analysis, and several iterations to satisfy the needs of users. With this project, I had no users and I needed to focus on materials. While I ultimately should have planned more, the haphazard make-it-up-as-you-go process led to a more clever design in the end because it allowed me to capitalize on chance discoveries.

What I mean is the fact that midway into my build I realized that the beams between the chair legs that I cut away were the exact diameter of the corks I was using. I used this fact to create a surface for my table to rest on without nails:

I owe this elegant solution to chance.

Honest Use

This chance discovery solved the irritating compromise I was planning to make in using screws to secure everything together rather than finding a solution in the existing materials themselves. It is also an example of what the Eames' called "honest use." This phrase "honest use" comes from Charles Eames' work with Eero Saarinen in the late 1930s on what would be the first of the famous Eames plywood chairs. At that time plywood was a very new creation, and its flexibility and strength awakened the creative spirit of many designers. Eames and Saarinen began a series of experiments with the material that sought to use it "honestly;" i.e. to create artwork and designs that relied upon its flexibility and strength. For Charles and Ray Eames the result was the Eames Lounge Chair Wood, a (once) inexpensive and lightweight chair that used plywood's natural flexibility and strength to express a Modernist simplicity of bare curves as well as proper seating.

Honest use of plywood in the Lounge Chair Wood

This has always inspired me and I think that with the Wino I've successfully captured some sense of honest use of the cork. Most corks are of uniform height and are thus capable of creating surfaces with pressed together, this is the table surface. Cork is also naturally flexible. Its ability to expand and contract creates pressure. Pressure is the key to this design. It is what keeps the cork-pegs in the legs, and it is actually what holds the legs vertical in the first place.

Embedded alongside the corks are the table legs.

Placed alongside the corks are the ends of the four table legs. The cork-pegs support the top of the table, and the top of table actually supports the legs. The pressure of the corks pressed together is enough to hold the table legs vertical in the top of the table. The result is considerable stability without any nails. The design relies mainly on the compressed corks for stability. It works too!

Sustainable Design through Upscaling

The other design ideal that I've aimed for is sustainable design through upcycling. Upcycling is the process of taking used materials and, through creative reuse, making them more valuable than they were before. This is one particularly bright future of recycling. As I said, aside from the clear acrylic table top (Clear Acrylic AR 1 if you're interested in making one), every part of the design is reused. Each wine cork, which are for the most part sustainably harvested in Portugal, is from a finished bottle of wine. Continuing with the wine theme, the iron ring which contains the wine corks is from an old wine barrel.

My mom had a bunch of wine barrel rings in her garden. Thanks mom!

The base of the table, too, is made from old wooden wine crates.

Each slat of wood is from an old wine barrel. The result is so pleasing to me that I want to make a table with this as the top.

In terms of a piece for potential production, material cost is a non-issue but material availability is. Now that I've learned how to make this table, I wouldn't say that the assembly is difficult. In terms of materials cost, the corks were free to me as were the iron ring and wine crates.  The chair cost me $35 to disassemble, and the acrylic top was $80 to have cut at TAP Plastics. I think that the materials would cost between $150 and $200 for each table. Finding those materials might be the hardest part about production. As I learned in the hunt for wine crates with beautiful typography burned into their surfaces, these old wooden crates are quickly becoming a thing of the past, now replaced by lighter, cheaper cardboard boxes. Only the most expensive wines are sold in wooden crates anymore. So, as an idea for furniture in production, this design would ultimately be faced with an absence of recyclable wooden wine crates. Nonetheless, the success I feel with the Wino signals to me the possibilities of upcycling as a force of sustainable design that goes beyond novelty appeal. I feel proud about the end product not just as an example of sustainable design, construction, and honest use, but as an aesthetic piece in itself.

Lessons Learned

I've learned a couple of things in the process of making this table. My biggest takeaway had to be that the design probably shouldn't always be planned out in advance of toying with the materials. Discovering that the peg holes in the chair legs were the same size as the wine corks was nothing short of an epiphany and really solved a lot of problems in the design, simplifying it, making the final product less susceptible to inaccuracies in drilling, and really getting me out of a slump. I wouldn't have realized this if I had thought out my design entirely before interacting with the materials. I think that I will steer my future designs towards a hands-on approach that allows these types of discoveries.

That said I do wish that I had created a plan for construction before I actually started building. I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out assembly.

Adding the final corks while trying not to disturb the alignment of the table legs or the circularity of the iron ring.

I think that this leads me back to the iterative process of design. The Wino, in terms of my assembly methods, should be seen as a work in process. If I was interested in pursuing this design further I would basically start over with the problems of assembly that I had and try to analyze and synthesize better solutions.