Despite our efforts in recycling and upcycling, saving and protecting, we are currently wasting around 98% of all available energy on this planet while we're still employing limited amounts of green sources of energy.
The urgency of finding sustainable resources and therefore introduce some much needed industrial innovation is one of the main preoccupations of the designers involved in the Design Column #7 "Wasted Matter" project.
The exhibition - taking place every three months at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and showcasing alternatives to our current use and waste of resources - will move to Amsterdam's Droog Gallery next week.
Some of the designers worked with recycled and re-used products: commissioned by Fendi in 2012, Studio Formafantasma created objects combining leather remnants from the company's bag-production process with other types of natural materials. The result is a collection that includes a stool made from pigskin and tanned wolffish skin, spoons made from shells, a carafe made from a cow’s bladder and a table made from bronze, marble and discarded Fendi leather.
Elisa van Joolen merged in her "Invert Footwear" (2013) left-over sneaker samples by leading brands with flip-flop soles, a project that also tackles wider issues such as logomania, branding and mass production Vs hand-crafted pieces.
The most interesting projects revolve around designing innovative electronic products, and creating entirely new materials. Focusing on electronic waste, Dave Hakkens designed "Phonebloks" (2013), a modular mobile phone made from demountable blocks that allows users to replace one broken part without having to throw away the entire phone (a very clever idea that may also help users customising the phone according to their needs).
After discovering that tree bark is a waste product in Europe and that early textiles were made from bark - a tradition that is still practised in Polynesia - Lenneke Langenhuijsen, turned bark into a flexible material that can be woven, moulded, burned with lasers, and even washed and dyed. Studio Eric Klarenbeek in collaboration with scientists from the University of Wageningen came up instead with a special armchair made with organic raw materials.
In the "Mycelium Chair", the 3D-printed basic structure consists of a mix of water, powdered straw and mycelium, the network of thread-like roots that a fungus uses to draw nutrition from the soil. The mycelium grows within the structure, consuming the water. When mushrooms appear on the surface, Klarenbeek dries the chair so that it hardens. He then coats the construction with a layer of biological plastic, which ensures that the fungus - employed by the designer as a living glue - cannot spread.
Marjan van Aubel's "Well Proven Chair" (2013) – developed with Jamie Shaw, American Hard Wood Export Council and the support of Benchmark Furniture – is inspired by the percentage of wasted wood.
The designer collects leftover wood chips, mixes them with organic resin, water and colours, starting a a chemical process that creates an expanding foaming wood mass that hardens into a solid structure.
Van Aubel's "Current Table" (2014) generates instead energy through a glass plate covered with a layer of solar cells (a technology discovered by Michael Graetzel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne). The table can be used therefore as a working surface or as a device to charge a phone or power a lamp.
The best thing about these designs is the fact that most of them reunite utility and aesthetics together, putting once again emphasis on improving our daily lives.
Design Column #7 "Wasted Matter" is on view at the Droog Gallery, Hôtel Droog, Staalstraat 7B, 1011 JJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 21st May to 29th June 2014.
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