OMI: Open Material Infrastructure

Intallation/performance about the re-use of building materials and concept/design of a platform for skip-divers

↑ Public intervention: OMI Kiosk at a construction site mediating materials to passersby

OMI – Open Material Infrastructure is an extended and applied investigation into the world of construction waste and its potentials for Re-use and Urban Mining.



Construction skips are the most visible interface between construction sites and the surrounding urban space, serving as a perfect metaphor for the industry‘s material-diarrhoea.


Thereby skips are often the endpoint of neglected and surplus construction material that could still be re-used, but instead gets down-cycled to secondary material, thermally exploited in heat-plants or recycled in metal products.

↑ Leftover materials at the a construction side in Vienna

However practitioners of Re-use and Urban Mining already exist. The best example are skip-divers – individuals collecting and using materials found in construction skips.

↑ OMI’s fb page as first low-threshold tool to share news of current construction sites

Inspired by the practice of skip-diving and as a result of the conducted research OMI proposes a twofold approach:
        Firstly OMI creates an online platform for the community of local skip-divers.
        Secondly OMI proposes an open online tool called OMI skip finder, a community-generated map to locate current construction skips and make them thereby easier accessible as sources of re-usable materials.

↑ OMI-map website mock-up: a skip-finding tool for the skip-diver community

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Developed at the Master program in Social Design
at the University of Applied Arts Vienna
Collaborators: Zuzanna Zajac, David Grüner
External support: Arch. Thomas Romm