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John: This is The Businessmakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And you are listening to a BusinessMakers WebXtra where I am continuing on with my conversation with Brenden Macaluso, creator and designer of Recompute. Now, in the earlier segment, you mentioned the design process of Recompute, comparing it to, say, a turkey dinner or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Brenden: Yeah. When I went through the design process, I had mentioned how much effort it takes to make all these different parts. I also want to consider the impacts of these different processes it took, because some people will say something like, oh, aluminum is really recyclable, but they don't realize how much energy and effort and chemicals are involved in processing aluminum ore into a final piece of, you know, cast aluminum or extruded aluminum.
John: Right.
Brenden: It's a lot of work.
John: Right.
Brenden: Cardboard's pretty simple.
John: It seems that way.
Brenden: It's pretty simple stuff.
John: Yeah.
Brenden: Recompute is made from 2 sheets of cardboard that are 4 x 10 feet long.
John: Okay.
Brenden: It's the size of a refrigerator box worth of cardboard, pretty much. It's die cut, so it's like a cookie cutter. So these patterns are cut on a little press, and it just pops them out, and they layer up together like a sandwich. I held them together with white glue, and people tend to forget how good white glue actually is at bonding things. It's nontoxic, it's biodegradable. It dries really, really strong on any kind of paper product.
John: That's what we used in preschool.
Brenden: Yeah, everything's preschool, like, white glue is good for macaroni sculptures.
John: That's right. You could make a macaroni computer.
Brenden: Exactly. Yeah. But the whole thing uses about 6 ounces of white glue that's just layered up between the pieces of cardboard and just stacked up together. So I make this shell body out of cardboard, so that's the 2nd process. The 3rd one is you actually have a wrapup-it is the casing cover-
John: That holds it together?
Brenden: Yeah, it's the covering up that you can pop open to access the parts.
John: Okay.
Brenden: And then finally it's the assembly of the parts. You know, actually sliding the motherboard and the hard drive and the power supply in and hooking it all up, and in the end we have a working computer.
John: Right.
Brenden: So it's just taken all these really complicated plastic molding processes and aluminum and steel and stamping and drilling and riveting and whatever else you have to do-
John: And just simplify it down.
Brenden: Just simplifying it down. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
John: Right. So ultimately, what do you want to see come of Recompute?
Brenden: What I would like to see come out of it is, some people keep asking me, "Are you going to build this thing? Are you going to make it real?" And my answer to that is, "Maybe." I'm not quite sure yet where to go with it. I had never anticipated the response to this thing that I've been getting. It was never planned to make it as a real thing. I use it as an example to think about. What I would like to see versus a cardboard computer being made is-well, that's okay if it's a cardboard computer. That's fine. I'm cool with that, too. But actually, I would like to see the principles in the foundation that was used to make Recompute, that kind of formula, applied to other objects and used in different capacities in how we deal with our sustainability and manufacturing of objects.
John: Brenden, thanks for coming on The Businessmakers Show.
Brenden: Thanks for having me.
John: No problem. We've been talking to Brenden Macaluso, the creator and designer of Recompute. And this has been a BusinessMakers WebXtra heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.