Microreview: The Way We Do Things

Low tech micro review
The handcart, equipped with a sail. Photo by Kris De Decker (screenshot with default data-saving duo-tone dithering)
Low tech micro review2
Detail, after clicking for the RGB image.
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Kozimo and De Decker with Low-tech Magazine’s handcart, halfway through a 30 km trip along the coast of Spain. Photo Linda Osusky
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Driving the handcart. Photo Linda Osusky
Low tech micro review5
The handcart with a heated table ready for transport. (rgb download from website)
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The solar powered server that runs the website
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The 50W and 30W solar PV panels on the balcony. Photo Marie Verdeil
Date
2026 May
Subtitle
Persemina Kent reviews Kris De Decker and Kozimo: “Rediscovering the Hand Cart”, in Low-tech Magazine, 2026.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Persemina Kent for NewsLibrary
Guest Editor

Nienke Terpsma

Reviewer

Persemina Kent is an independent artist-researcher, aspiring to self-build and for the moment based in Brussels.

Publication Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 78

@sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

Low-tech Magazine was founded in November 2007 by Kris De Decker. Since 2018, the magazine runs on a in self-hosted, solar-powered server in Barcelona which sometimes goes offline. Written by Kris Den Decker, solar web designed by Marie Verdeil, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Marie Otsuka, it publishes at most 12 well-researched stories per year. Since 2019, LTM also appears in print for offline reading.

 

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

In each episode of solar.lowtech.be Kris De Decker researches a basic human technique; long-term, detailed, hands-on, with enormous curiosity, technical precision and historical depth. Organised under Low-tech Solutions, High-tech Problems, and Obsolete Technology there are articles on “Waste-fed fish ponds”, “Fruit Walls” and “Pigeon Towers”. Meanwhile the site itself is an invention, experimentation, and demonstration of a “solar-powered and self-hosted” website “designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content” with regular analysis and updates on tweaks and improvements. Design and journalism are involved, topics branch out over years. The latest post, a collaboration with design student Kozimo, is about (the process of building) a handcart, but also a “what if” about the means of transport we generally use and take for granted. The authors build and test the handcart in real life, ponder philosophically and offer the reader an extensive “how-to". De Decker’s research lifts me up out of a narrow understanding of the here and now and back to the shared basics of dealing with our fragile mammal bodies: real poetry.

 

All images are sourced from the publication website.