Today, Julian gave a lecture about his work and demonstrated how he works with subtraction pattern cutting. It was very inspiring. His design process is very poetic and performative. He engages with the material and space in such a unique way, it really changed my view about garment making.
He does not measure when he cut the fabric. He shared that whoever you are making the garment for, their movement is the measurement. He uses video to record his process and reverses the video so it looks like he was making the garment instead of deconstructing it. He also demystified how a garment is made through his process. If you cut a hole and lift the fabric from the valley fold line, then you have made a garment!! SO simple.
He was also talking about as a designer, you need to know how much of you reside in the work you make, that is your identity as a designer. Also question how do you use your process/tools ? What are the other ways to use those process and tools?
For my next project, I wanted to make a garment that is transformable and functional.
I let my bioplastics from test 1 dry on a flat non-stick sheet for 3 days and recorded how it transformed. The one with coffee grounds dried completely and became really hard with some flexibility. The edges dried first as they are a little bit thinner and it curled up and refused to stay flat as it dried. The material still has a strong and pleasant roasted coffee aroma, idea for masking the odor from decomposing food waste. It also has a matte finishing surface give it a more classy look:)
My other test was with spirulina, they stayed flat after a week and became very elastic, like a gummy. When I think about the ingredients that I used, it does resembles about of same ingredients that are used in making gummy bear.
Both test result are surprisingly interesting. I noticed the spirulina one became easier to tear the drier they get, however, the one with coffee grounds became stronger and stiffer. I will design more tests in the coming week to try to find a solution for the warping issue with the coffee ground bioplastic.
In searching for an environmental friendly option for the food compost bucket within the home waste management unit, I turned my interest in bioplastic. I wanted to create a bucket that is durable and biodegradable by itself.
Aside from the bio plastics recipes Anna and Annie shared with us during the material workshop, I researched couple of other resources for different bioplastic recipes and decided to chose one base recipe and adding food 0r food waste into the bioplastic to create a biocomposite.
First, I mixed a batch of my base recipe, after it started thickening I added 500ml coffee grounds that I got from the canteen and kept stirring for another 2 minutes.
The mixture solidified quickly but had no elasticity at this point. I am going to wait and see if anything changes after 24 hours and 48 hours.
As the coffee bioplastic is drying on the mat, I started the second experiment. I added powdered spirulina to see if it will increase the elasticity of the bioplastic since it is a blue-green algae, it is a natural pigment as well.
There was a lot more foam on the surface but it was very elastic. It solidified very quickly but was still squishy at this stage. The base encapsulated the powder inside and created a very beautiful pattern, almost like a green glitter.
I need to figure out a way to make it stiff and durable. Maybe adding more solid food waste will help? Using the bioplastic as a natural adhesive or figure out alternatives to the plasticizer in the recipe. More experiments are need…
Once I had the idea of using food waste to create materials for the food compost bin within the uint. I recalled a product I saw while I was in the V&A for the Food exhibition. A company called Kaffeeform used coffee grounds to make coffee cups. I thought that was a really nice idea. So I decided to look into it little bit more.
Product designer Julian Lechner was intrigued by the idea of creating something new and lasting out of supposed waste, so he began experimenting with coffee grounds. He used coffee grounds mixed with natural resin and wood dust to create the material for the Kaffeeform cups. I realized my idea is very similar to this but with a different application of the material property.
I used a basic formula to create the bioplastic base then added coffee grounds into the mix. The bioplastic acted as an adhesive to glue the coffee grounds together. I am having difficulty to keep the material from curling and deforming as it drys flat at the moment. Maybe I should try to use mold and pressure to force the material into a form like he did? It took Julian 3 years to find the perfect formula so it can be manufactured. I will need to do more tests with the material and think about more potential applications from the coffee grounds or other food waste.
I was really drawn to the potential uses of spent coffee grounds as it is an abundant resource and easily accessible, more importantly, if not reused, it will end up in the landfill.
One start-up company called Bio-bean saw the potential of coffee grounds as a source to produce biogas so they started the company to collect used coffee grounds and use them to produce biogas.(https://www.bio-bean.com/)
Kaffeeform uses coffee grounds to create coffee cup, closing the circle of coffee making.
Coffee grounds can also be used as a fertilizer. “In 2010, Yoshihito Nakagawa, supply chain division manager for Starbucks, was tasked with finding new ways to recycle food waste from Starbucks stores in Japan. A new food recycling law was set to require all companies in the restaurant industry to reduce or recycle more than 50% of food waste within the next five years.” (https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2016/starbucks-japan-coffee-grounds/)
They discovered that coffee grounds can be turned into cattle feed for cows or used as compost. Processors add bacteria to the feed, which gives it antioxidant properties that increase milking efficiency, and prevent infections in the cows. The compost also helps replenish nutrients in the soil and increase water retention in crops.
Then it made me think since it is a material that will eventually end up in the soil. It is a very good material to explore to make the disposable food compost bucket because not only it will become compost itself and has great nutritious value to food crops or flowers but as a container, it will hold the food waste long enough for the transportation and collection of domestic food waste.
I made my mock up model with foam board today. I have decided that I don’t like doing it even though I think the result looks fine. The process is a pain in the butt because I really don’t like gluing things together. I might be feeling this way because it is my first time making mock ups with foam board so it was extra difficult.
I found a very useful video about how to make models with foam board, learnt a lot from this guy.
Making the model helps me to think more about the design and how different part of the design come together as a whole. There are so many nuances that I could have played with, justing getting the rounded corner to my liking took roughly 20 minutes. The 3D mock up also give me a better visualization of my design in the space. I could imagine how the scaled up model will look like at the site(in this case, the kitchen), then I can also think about size, color, material, surface and other attributes of the product.
After I moved into my London flat in Bayswater, my property manager showed me where I can dispose my waste in the area and I received a booklet after setting up my council tax payment from City of Westminster and there is only one page recycling guide.
The guide was not very detailed at all and it applies more to homeowner instead of tenants live in flats or mansion block as we need to use the community bins for trash and recycling. Because it contains so little information in just two pages, you can go one more step further to go on the website to learn more about it. There are no instructions about composting at all or anything related to how to deal with food waste.
Comparatively, recycling guide in Japan is so much more detailed. It has detailed instructions on how to separate recyclable materials and prepare them for collection, also the specific collection location and time. The category of recyclables and waste is more detailed as well. Based on their post-consumption use, waste are categorized into different types and allocated different collection time, location and pick up frequency.
I recalled my trip to Tokyo, my first impression was that it is the cleanest metropolitan that I have ever been to. And I had to quickly learn about the way they recycle and dispose waste because you will not find trash can on the street in public space. They take all waste home and properly dispose them. Recycling has been integrated into their life and ritualized as part of their daily routine. Can we achieve something similar with how we manage our waste and recycling in City of Westminster?
One thing I noticed after moving to my apartment in Bayswater was how bad recycling is done here. According to the handbook for the residents, anyone who lives in flats or mansion flats are supposed to use the community trash and recycling bins for their household trash and recycling collection. Hotels and private homes need to leave their trash on the curb side and they are collected only once a week.
There has been an overflowing issue with disposals of trash and recycling contamination in the area. Because the home rubbish bin is full so people start to leave their trash outside of the bin or stuff them inside the recycling bin.
Protest posters are everywhere, but nothing has changed.
In order to study domestic waste disposal behavior, I unpacked 7 waste bins from the first floor of RCA white city campus. Since we only have recycling and non recyclable bins, majority of food waste end up being in the non-recyclable bins and in the rooms that only have the recycling bins, everything end up being in the recycling bin because people are not going to make the extra effort and walk to a waste bin that is not located close to where they are. Waste disposal is a very localized activity after all.
Also the packaging from some products are very misleading. The sandwich box from Tesco said the carton of the box is recyclable but the film is actually not and it is very confusing for the end user because to recycle the carton, you have to separate the film from it then dispose the carton in the recycling bin. Also some package will say 100% biodegradable and 100% recyclable, then which bin it should go in? Non-recyclable because it is degradable so it will go into landfill or recycle bin because it is 100% recycle?
Some single use utensils will have 100% biodegradable printed on it, but because we already have the common perception of single used utensils are made of plastic so people tend to assume they are made of plastic and put them in the recycling bins. But not all plastics are recyclable.
Because of all these confusion and bad waste disposal habit, all the recycling bins that I unpacked are contaminated. Once theses recycling bags are collected by the recycling company, they will eventually go into landfill because of the contamination.
Recent years saw a trend of developing new bio-based plastic alternative or creating product entirely from waste materials in the design filed. Many designers has made progress on inventing new eco-friendly materials or create beautiful products from waste materials. But the cost of producing those products are high because the cost of sourcing high quality materials. If we can properly sort the waste so they can be used and sourced by designers more easily, then the cost of those innovative product could be reduced.
My findings from this unpacking process is very eye opening. It helped me to better understand domestic waste disposal behavior. Waste disposal is very intuitive. People don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy to think about which bin the waste should go in and we should have a better product to facilitate this daily activity and help people build the habit of separating waste and recycling.
Unpacking as a way to study the current waste disposal behavior made me realized that the things we throw away today will be the artefact in the future. Maybe I should create an imagined exhibition of the future artefact that are made from all the trash we throw away as a way to criticize the current “out sight, out of mind” attitude towards waste disposal.
After my research trips from the V&A, I started working on my ideas of creating a waste management unit for people live in flats in London. Drawing from my inspirations of the artefact in V&A: A Japanese lacquer picnic set from the Edo period. I sketched down some ideas for my design.
I loved how everything is compartmentalized in this object so I want to use the same idea to create a product for waste management at home. I choose to use the existing recycling categories from my council and use that as the guide to compartmentalize within the unit. I also recalled the lecture about the inclusiveness so I wanted to put Braille for visually impaired people to help them navigate the slots on top of the bin.
RCA Graduate diploma 2019 