Matchmade on the Web : A Resource Exchange Platform for Roof Tiles

Ele Mun (Year: 4)

The roof tile’s many varieties must now be met with suspicion. At a closer look, this often celebrated quality is detrimental to the roof tile’s reuse process. After the roof’s undoing, these volumes are scattered all throughout the landscape - sometimes, they make it into one of the many reclamation yards in the UK, albeit in small, disparate batches. The project started (and had in many ways ended) in these literal fields of roof tiles - seemingly incompatible interlocking components are forced together, a number of them released from the curse of having to work only with its own kind. Could a resource exchange platform (a Tinder for tiles, let’s say) introduce a much needed convenience and help dissolve the bottlenecks in its reuse process? An interface that confirms to roofers and material resellers alike a matrix of compatibility across all previously encountered roof tiles in the region is proposed. The many disparate batches of roof tiles strewn throughout the UK have been given a central node as a reference point – not geographically but in the cloud. The act of sourcing becomes, ever more than before, the act of designing.