A perfect machine produces no waste. In the ideal scenario, all energy put into a machine would be efficiently converted into work, and an equal quantity of material that enters the machine would exit as product. This, as we know, is impossible; all machines emit waste. Machines discharge heat, exhaust, various unpleasant liquids, and excess material as a matter of course. Design theorist and craftsperson David Pye described this fourth kind of waste as a technique—“wasting technique,” he writes in The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, is the “carving away [of] a piece of material until the shape you want remains.”
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