GOMI

‘Gomi’ is a Japanese word meaning discarded trash or junk. Science fiction writer William Gibson, one of the prophets of ‘cyber punk’, introduced the term to English colloquial language through his ‘sprawl’ series of novels. ‘Gomi’ is the name given to the unwanted objects that are re-invented to suit a new purpose, a comment on the excessive nature of our material culture.

Back in our early days at Six Degrees, we became interested in gomi and gomi hunting partly through creative curiosity and partly through the need to find cheap materials. Through chance friendships with industrial wreckers we were exposed to the possibility of re-using unwanted materials on a high volume, limited palette basis. We were invited into sites that were being demolished and over a weekend, we’d go in and remove what we wanted to reuse.

This process significantly shaped Six Degrees as a practice, both in terms of our aesthetic and in our inquisitive and imaginative approach to design and materiality.

An expression of our early gomi hunting can still been seen in our office today: our kitchen table is constructed out of a reclaimed gymnasium wall panel which still bears the line markings of its previous, sporting life.