This is a postcard I've been wanting to make for a while. Generally I try to focus on salvage, reuse, and repurposing in this library economy, but I think it's also important to show some of the fab shops that supply new goods. (And to include a bit of the industrial side of solarpunk.) Degrowth practices can meet a lot of needs with what we already have, but entropy wins in the end and society will have to produce at least some new stuff to replace the old. I think it's worth exploring how a solarpunk setting will do that, and how the items produced for a library economy might look different than what we have today.
If this topic interests you, I wrote out a more detailed exploration here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/writing:repairability_in_solarpunk (the slrpnk.net writing community has a wiki for sharing solarpunk worldbuilding research - feel free to message me if you want to add something!).
I'll also note that a lot of these ideas came from some posts on fabrication and spimes EricHunting wrote in the solarpunk subreddit.
Okay so what's in the scene? This is a somewhat mundane solarpunk location: a little fabrication co-op specializing in appliances, set up in an old warehouse at the corner of a tram track and a pedestrianized street.
The folks who work here use standardized parts and metal stock to produce physical goods based on popular open-source designs. Their customers are library networks which need to keep certain goods in stock, and regular people who either want to own something long-term or need/want a customized version of it. I think people might place a generic order online, or stop by the small office just inside the automatic doors to talk over their needs and customizations.
The items the folks in this co-op make are designed to last - in some ways they might look simpler, or clunkier than modern-day appliances. The designs generally prioritize standardized, easily-replaceable parts and ease of access for repairs, so the items are often bulkier and heavier than a old-world commercial product, and may lack some of the features enabled by additional electronics. They generally disdain adhesives, tabs, and plastic shrouds, preferring to make the fasteners easily accessible, even going so far as to print/etch instructions for disassembly onto the machinery whenever a step has to be unintuitive.
That said, their custom products often feature many other kinds of embellishment: embossing, etching, painting, gilding, and other artwork. For a solarpunk society where 'defaultness' and resale value are a low priority and punk and DIY are well-established movements, it's common for small workshops to produce appliances to spec in every way but a decorated case, or to provide the means to add decoration once their customers get it home.
Speaking of simplicity of design, the yellow and blue mural on the building above the ramp is meant to be a stylized depiction of a cam sequencer, a simple electromechanical system for activating and de-activating switched states in machinery, such as washing machines and dryers. These have been at least partially replaced with microcontrollers and custom Printed Circuit Boards today (as they are cheap, much more re-programmable, and can provide detailed error codes), but it seems likely to me that cam/drum sequencers might feature more heavily in a solarpunk setting where ease of production and reliability are prioritized.
As for the rest of the scene, the living canopy shading the pedestrianized street is based heavily on similar creations in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. The observatory-like dome in the background is meant to be part of a solar collection/concentration rig which I described/depicted in more detail here. And the tram track is a former light-rail track which has been folded into the city's expanding public transit network. I like to imagine that they still run a cargo tram past on a scheduled basis, and that it plays a role in delivering stock/parts and collecting finished products. Probably they sometimes back a library boxtruck up against the end of the loading dock, or haul stuff away on electric rickshaws or pushcarts.
This image (like all the [https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/postcards-from-a-solarpunk-future/](Postcards from a Solarpunk Future)) is CC-BY. Use it how you like.
