The hardest part of collecting materials from the construction site isn’t the weight or finding what we need—it’s earning the trust of the workers.
Even with colleagues from the construction team and a heads-up from the site manager, we’re still strangers disrupting the usual flow of the site. Naturally, the workers are wary and unsure. Sometimes, they just watch us quietly, and other times, they ask, "What are you doing? What are these construction waste for?"
In the early days of the project, with no results to show yet, all we could do was paint a picture of our vision—turning these discarded materials into furniture and pieces of the office. After many conversations and a lot of hands-on work, the mood began to shift. The workers weren’t just spectators anymore. Sometimes they’d suggest, "This piece is better," or even pitch in to help us load materials onto the truck.
The trust and understanding we built with the construction workers was by far the most rewarding part of the material collection process.
photo credit：META Design
photo credit：META Design
photo credit：META Design
