Speculative design is a new term that I have never heard of, so I was really excited about today’s workshop. Basically, speculative design are useless things designed for provocation or to speculate and even visualize what future products could look like and what function they could fulfill in our lives.

We did an excise where we try to create speculative products by analyzing the current signal/trends across all aspects of our life. When we start to brainstorm and create crazy stories based on the trends provided by the future scan, I felt like I was the writer for the TV series Black Mirror. All those fictional scenarios we created felt too real to be fictional. For example, it is possible to marry an object in the future or have an expiration date on marriage or harness energy from your body or have a toy for babies in the womb etc..

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Our team picked a list of possible trends and started put our stories together. Basically, because the government started to put tax on trash so we started to figure out ways to harness energies from our body and transmit the energy to power a 3d food printer that are customizable. So we started to think about different ways to harness energies from our body and what kind of product can accomplish this task. We thought a T-shirt is a great agent for it. A high-tech T-shirt that can capture vibrations from the movements of your body and transmit that into energy. It can also pick up the unique body oder of people so it can detect people who have similar scent as you to help with people’s social life in a very busy urban life. As we speculate more about the future, suddenly, I felt very sad about where we are going as a society. We created an episode of Black Mirror and imaging what it is like to live in that world. The whole process was very enjoyable and freeing. It is a great creative exercise for your brain and definitely boosted my creativity. I did feel mentally drained afterwards and need a brain break but I am very excited about incorporating this kind of exercise into my own design practice.

I have been reading about academic papers and doctoral dissertations on production of bioplastics through food waste valorization. Such as Review of high-value food waste and food residues biorefineries with focus on unavoidable wastes from processing by Dominika Alexa Teigiserova, Lorie Hamelin and Marianne Thomsen, Food Waste biorefinery: Sustainable strategy for circular bioeconomy by Shikha Dahiy, A Naresh Kumar, Shanthi Sravan, Sulogna Chatterjee, Omprakash Sarkar. Bioplastics from vegetable waste via an eco-friendly water-based process by Giovanni Perotto.

These researches proved my observations of the recent trend in creating products with bioplastics as an effort in the design community to help tackle the global plastic pollution issue and an overwhelming interest in researching food waste based bioplastics. It helped me to built a strong theoretical foundation for my own investigation for this project and validated my idea as part of the overall paradigm shift in design culture. Now we are moving into a more material-driven, eco-conscious design practice. And that is where I situate my work in the field.

These research also gave me the technical knowledge to understand what I am trying to do. The chemistry behind each material that has already been developed and the science behind it. It informed my own experimentation with the material so I am not shooting in the dark aimlessly and wasting my energy.

All the papers I have read gave very detailed background about the current global food waste situation analysis. Which helped me to understand the greater context of how much impact my research could have. According to Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) of the United Nations reported that around 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year globally. Which is why research in bioplastics through food waste valorization has been one of the most active research area in the last two decades.

However, most of the food waste those paper were talking about are pre-consumption agricultural or industrial food waste, not post-consumption food waste. Therefore, I wanted to focus my investigation in this particular area. I also discovered that bioplastics production is currently only 1% of the all plastic production worldwide because of the high production cost. Therefore, I wanted to also experiment with the ways that could potentially reduce the production cost of bioplastics. Such as a localized biorefinery.

I managed to manipulate the shape of this sheet material and let it dry on a 3D form. To my surprise, it captured the form of the object which means it can be molded somehow. It also has this translucency quality to it. So I though I’d experiment with light in it. I really love this! The texture of the surface was highlighted by the light.

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I also experimented with encasing the LED lights inside the material so the material itself became the light source. Not sure where this is headed but the point right now is just to explore and throw the idea out there.

Since I am considering luminaries as a possible application of the material, I looked into bioluminescence lamp. (https://haeckels.co.uk/journal/bioluminescence-lamp/) and other possible bioluminescence I can use to create lights. For example, phytoplankton- a bioluminescence algae.

(https://www.instructables.com/id/Grow-Your-Own-Bioluminescent-Algae/)

I was introduced to this little booklet by Alkesh. During our tutorial, we had a discussion about how localize production and consumption of products could help resolve a lot issue associated with the current way we consume and produce goods. Which correspond to a direct quote in chapter 3 from the booklet:

” When production and consumption both become localized, the temptation to speed up production, indefinitely and at any price, disappears. All the endless difficulties and problems that our present-day economic system presents, too, would then come to an end.”

The proposition seems profoundly idealistic, but it holds truth to the core of this statement. If we can produce good that are sourced from local material and made locally, then we don’t have to concern the carbon footprint we leave from exporting raw material overseas and import finished goods back. We will not be so vulnerable to so called trade war and sensitive to the slightest rise in global oil price. We will have no need to discuss the inhuman work conditions of child labor in a Nike Factory where our shoes are made somewhere in southeast Asia.

In villages in India, millions of works are displaced by machinery work. Young people move away to big cities for better paying job, urban space become overcrowded, then lots of issues related to urbanization emerges… The story sounds way too familiar, not only in India, but everywhere in the world.

He talked about rehabilitation of village industries, and how village uplift is impossible, unless we solve the pressing economic distress. Therefore, to induce the villagers to utilize their idle hours is in itself solid uplift work.

The term “organic” food is invented by us to refer to farm fresh produce. But any farm produce is organic before food were industrialized. In the mainstream design field, designers talk about sustainability and using biodegradable materials to create products. But before industrial revolution, most stuff were made from natural materials, such as bamboo, silk, paper, iron, clay, wool, leather, glass etc…. Those materials are what people in the craft world have been using for really longtime. Somehow, it seems like we created a completely new concept in design, when people in craft have been practicing that concept for centuries. There are so many great inventions came out of the industrial revolution, but we tend to go through these cycles when we experience the damage industrialization, capitalism, consumerism and globalization have caused and start seeking ways to reverse things to the way they were before all that happened.

Recent years, ‘shop Local, support small business’ has been a rising trend in the consumer culture in the U.S. More and more people started picking up traditional crafts and creating products to sell them at local markets. This reminds me of ‘back-to-the-land ‘ movement, which is “any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy and local community  than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life. “

Things like the Whole Earth Catalogs written by Stewart Brand were created as a result from this movement. From my own experience in the craft community, I can sense that people have started another wave of movement. Lots of my friends have moved to more rural ares and started to create more sustainable life style.

This community focused way of life is what I want for myself and what I want to help develop within an urban setting. With my current social experimental project idea, I want to see if it is possible to create a community where business in the block can make products with the food waste they have created and somehow trade they products within the community to reduce the waste and create a ‘village factory’ within their small community.

I wanted to create a bioplastic cookbook, a catalogue of the recipes that I have developed with DIY projects designed for the particular material in the cookbook. So I decided to go to the book store and research different layouts of cookbooks and study how a cookbook is constructed to help users to use it to recreate the dishes in the book because that is essentially what I want to accomplish with my own bioplastic cookbook.

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After getting all my ingredients from Amazon, I set up a food science lab in my kitchen for my bioplastic experimentation.

A dehydrator can be very handy as it dries the sample and get rid of the moisture at the same time. I am going to employee the same methodology that are used to develop glazes in the ceramic world to create more bioplastic recipes. I will find a base recipe, then swap the ingredient with materials that has similar properties, also adds colorants and additives to change the color and texture of the material. I collected used tea leaves from a local tea house and spent coffee grounds from school canteen to use as additive. Beetroot power, turmeric, sprilina and red cabbage juice are being used as colorants.

We talked about what failure means to us as artists and designers today and what can we do with failures in our practice?

I often struggle with failures in my own practice, because I set the bar very hight for myself, most of the time, I can not meet the goal that I set up for myself, so I always felt very disappointed by the results. Failure is when expectation does not match what was being observed. I realized that how things turn out will never be completely under your control. I, as an artist and designer will have to embrace that idea and live with it. My own struggle comes from the fact that I always want things to be under my control and I will get very upset when things does not go the way that I wanted. I have to constantly fight this tendency to employee a linear plan-execution approach in my practice. It is not easy.

Reflecting on myself as a perfectionist, I find myself have a very narrowly defined aesthetics. I like pretty things, for example, things with elegant form and made perfectly with great craftsmanship. I had a hard time to find beauty in ugly things or what I consider poorly made things. That mentality prevented me from allowing myself producing anything that I would consider ugly in my creative process. I am alway very careful and calculated with every decision that I make.

I found this idea of intentionally creating a failure quite liberating. How can I create a perfect failure? Setting the bar low to start with take a lot of pressure off my shoulder. I know what I am gonna make is going to be terrible, but I don’t care because that was the goal. Having this mentality is so liberating and it allowed me to loosen up in my creative process.

We had the all afternoon to turn one of our past work into a failure. I put some of my bioplastic samples in the water and microwaved them. One of the sample completely dissolved and the other one softened so I can reshape it. One was a complete failure but the other one turned out to be a success piece of information that I could potentially use for future works.

I have been in a close-knitted craft community for the past three years. I was not exposed to the world of design and material innovation. After being introduced to bioplastics through my program in RCA, I was under the impression that bioplastic is a freshly invented material at the moment. As I research more about bioplastics and the world of biomaterials, I realized that I entered the game way very late…

I started doing extensive research about biomaterials, especially, bioplastics made from food waste. However, Many research articles I have read about innovative biomaterials always ended with a sentence like ” real applications will depend on whether these materials can be economically scaled up.” I keep thinking about why do you need to wait to scale it up economically? If you have invented a new material that has great potential to have positive impact to the environment, why delaying it because it might not be economically viable to scale up?

Analysis on potentials for commercialization and mass production of these materials is what’s preventing applications from these ground breaking research to be available on the market sooner. Even at school, we are taught that as product designers, we need to think about the potential of commercialization of our design. But whats more important is to get the green product to the market as soon as possible. So we can flash the bad ones out of the circulation and replace them with their sustainable alternatives. By doing so, it will also force big globe companies to take a more eco-friendly approach to their global business and take initiatives to localize the production.

Concerning about scaling up seems like the go-to mind set if you are a material researcher. But maybe if they can open up the resources and localize production and mobilize unused labor in the urban settings employing a community-led business mode. Then, you don’t have to worry about scaling it up. You can maintain a small-scale production at the local level and mobilize members from the community as labor (such as the Company drinks in UK) and supply the product locally, then you don’t have to think about scaling up the production of the material at a global level. This approach will accelerate the process of pushing the green technology to the market as soon as possible.

Non-profits like Materiom builds bioplastic community by hosting work shops to transfer knowledge and using their online platform to share recipes and ideas.

I want to start something similar back in Boston. I would like to host workshops to educate people about the potential of this amazing new sustainable material and teach people how to make materials and products such as flip flop (because it is the easiest shoe to make and they are also the oldest form of footwear and the most popular footwear in the world. Most flip flops today are made from plastic threatening the health of the ocean. Lost and tossed flip-flops are travelling oceans and are becoming a routine find during beach cleanups. Plastic flip-flops also wear down easily transporting microplastic to the ocean through our waterways.) This flip flop project will be a great project for me to experiment the idea of design as a form of social activism. Although I think if I were to do this in London, I should do a sleeper version 🙂

(https://theoceanpreneur.com/plasticfreenomad/make-positive-ocean-impact-with-your-flip-flops-flip-the-flop/)

I want to develop a catalog of samples and a booklet for recipes and instructions for the workshop and create an online platform as a database for people to share their recipes and projects.

Today, I talked to Ian about my idea of creating a localized circular economy within small local businesses that produces organic waste.

Initially, I wanted to investigate the workflow of some local food business such as coffee shop, tea house, bakery and juice stands to identify food waste produced in the process and make products that can be used in the shop with those waste. He suggested that I can somehow create a community trading system where each participating business can produce products with food waste produced within their business and exchange the goods based on business needs. For example, the spent coffee grounds can be made into flower pot and send it to the flower shop next door. Or coasters created with orange peels from the juice stands can be used in the bar across the street. That way, not only wastes are reduced and reused in this process but local businesses started to interact with each other help building a stronger bond within the community. Also, transporting all the products on foot because of the approximate of the geological location among all local business, this mode reduces carbon footprint from transporting and distributing products produced somewhere else.

I could present the project as a proposed narrative—a story about a self-sufficient community who uses waste produced within the community to create and trade products they can use for their business such as signage, gift cards, packaging, furniture etc.

Making a documentary to demonstrate how this can play out maybe?

Once I started looking into more information about bioplastic, I realized that I needed to grow my material knowledge in order to conduct my material experimentations more effectively. Therefore, I signed up for a workshop with a non-profit organization called Materiom. They have been working with a sustainable lab called the green lab in London to develop an extensive material library for bioplastic.

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We worked through couple of recipes together and that it was very enlightening. There are so may possibilities and I can’t wait to start my own bioplastic lab at home!