everywhere in our school you can see this small weird objects just lying around. on the sink, on the table, in the hands of a sleepy student, paper cups took over our school. inexpensive to produce paper cups are the easiest way to carry the precious liquids but is it good for the environment? more and more people are becoming conscious about how much trash we produce and how to turn it the other way around. as basicyear people we know how many different things you can find in the trash or how many things you can make out of it.
lets start up easy – re-using our cute little paper cups.
look at some examples of art made out of cuppies
make some toys for your kids/cats/boyfriends/girlfriends and imaginary friends
pro version – pimp up your bedroom with this marvelous coffee cup lamp
you can even use it as a pen holder! okay lets get real
our school uses around 400 paper cups a day
400 x 5 days = 2000 paper cups a week.
it’s a lot, isn’t it?
why do we do it?
too busy?
too lazy?
too easy to just take it from the canteen?
(maybe we should try it this way)
paper cups are usually coated inside with polyethylene (PE) a thermoplastic polymer, what makes them difficult to recycle.
most of them are being thrown to RESTAVFAL or KARTON bins but what happens next?
after you throw your cup to either one of this containers, they go into the bin in front of school. then, they are taken by Milieu Service Nederland to an oven and get burnt. unfortunately the company cannot say what exact place they end up in, because there is many ovens and places where our trash goes to.
most of us reuse paper cups as a water container while painting but afterwards they’re just being left alone dirty, polluting not only classrooms but the environment.
keeping in mind how much cups we use, therefore how much waste we produce I believe bringing your own cup to school is as easy as taking another paper cup from the canteen.
A few of the words that were coming up in my mind when I saw and started to research this chair, so I thought this will be a perfect chair and designer to write about. To find out how deep this designer can go into material research, waste and renewable energy. Marjan Van Aubel is one of the designers who stimulates this.
Marjan van Aubel is a designer that makes everyday objects in new innovative ways. She is trying to make people aware of the fact that renewable energy is everywhere. Normally there will be a waste of 50/80% during normal manufacture. Van Aubel and James Shaw found a way how to use and incorporate that wastage during the manufacture.
When I saw “the well-proven chair” for the first time it looked like a normal chair because of the simple legs of the chair but when you see the back it becomes a object. For me it was hard to understand the material. I didn’t know where the chair was made of. The nice structure camouflages the fact that it is actually made out of shavings and sawdust.The sitting part is beautiful and smooth, making this chair nice to sit on and really nice to look at. It’s good that the legs are simple so the focus stays on the sit area. With her designs she try’s to combine design and technology. She strives for a more renewable life
For me this was a really interesting topic because i didn’t know a lot about this kind of experimenting with material. There are so designers working with this way of designing. They are busy with making new materials to make life more renewable. I think these new materials are needed because our resources are running out.
As an artist/designer Marjan van Aubel always was interested in how things are made, a reason why i feel related to her. I always want to figure out how ‘it’ is put together.
She was also intrigued by solar panels and why they are so ugly and why they can ruin the face of a building. Why are the panels not integrated in the tiles? I really agree with her. That is why she started at her collage time a research about energy. Now not only design was important also science. She graduated with “The Energy Collections” a set of solar glassware that discharges through a matching bookshelf, which serves as a rather large battery. This kind of thinking can make our life a lot more easy an conscious. Like I said we are running out of material so this kind of design thinking can improve this.
I have a lot of interest in nature. For me that makes her work really interesting, because she interacts nature with design. I have a few works i made a few years a go which are also related to this.
I investigated how nature and mathematics have a lot of comparisons. Like the golden ratio and Fibonacci. You can see it in a lot of plants, a lot of leaves grow in a spiral around the branch to get enough sunlight and rain. It is also in our human body. For me structure in nature is an important way for making a work. It is really nice that nature can help us to make products. I think it’s also good that new young designers/artists also use this opportunity to invent new products and make use of our nature. Like her latest project “The Current Table‘ which was also able to generate energy. This project she made in response to “the energy collection”.
The market for these well made products is getting bigger and bigger. People are more concerned with a healthy and a conscious way of life and designers will react on that.
This movie from 2012 shows how a lot of designers are busy with the meaning of material.
It’s fascinates me a lot how this young designer are making al these new innovative products. I found a movie on this page and it shows how scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms.
Now you can see how new materials, new invented but also already existing materials but used in an other way will blow your mind. For me their is still a lot to discover about al this material researches and the meaning of material. This research showed me a lot new ways of seeing waste and make new material with it. So we al can be more conscious and re-use waste to make something new.
When I first saw the Sea Chair I immediately reacted on the aesthetics – it’s imperfections, hints of craftsmanship, and it’s strange plastic molding. The plastic resembled, though not clearly, marble stone. Soon after I found out of it’s relation to the Great Pacific Patch [x].
The Great Pacific patch is a floating soup of plastic debris covering an area one and a half time the size of USA and is trapped in the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Many organizations have tried to clean it but it has been deemed as “the worlds largest dump” – feared impossible to defeat.
The plastic debris releases chemical additives and plasticizers into the ocean and finds is way into the food we eat. The fishes and seabirds mistake the plastic for food, as you can see on the picture above showing a Laysan albatross chick (90 % of Laysan albatross chick carcasses and regurgitated stomach contents contain plastics.)
The Sea Chair is made of plastic debris collected from this garbage patch. It is part of a project with the same name lead by design duo Studio Swine, Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves; in collaboration with Kieran Jones determined to clean this floating dump and lower the production of plastic
The overall concept is to design with sustainable systems while treating the aesthetics with the same importance. With the use of design they form the plastic waste into an aesthetically desirable object. They believe that desire is the factor for change.
The sea chair project uses craftsmanship, together with recycling and protection for the environment, as a part in the ecological cycle. Like a craftman the designer should follow the whole process of production. Studio Swine uses tools and created devices to collect and process the marine debris along the shoreline. The Nurdler is a machine, that was created while being inspired by the miners, sorting plastic from the other waste. The next step is in the Sea Press which is a furnace and hydraulic press that heats and molds the plastic into the stool.
The Nurdler
The Sea Press
The stool is just the start in Studio Swine’s environmental cause. They also want to convert fishing boats into plastic refineries, so that the fishermen would collect plastic instead of fish. They mean that this would lead to lowering the demand for new plastics and therefore also the production of new plastic. Eventually this would also mean that the fisher men could continue fishing instead of picking plastic.
The connection between chairs and the seamen comes from a tradition amongst Britain’s port towns where sailors were required to have carpentry skills for repairing wooden ships at sea and after they retire many of them would continue to make wood furniture, in this case instead of wooden chairs the fishermen would make plastic chairs.
The Sea Chair proves that Eco-design goes hand in hand with craftsmanship and collectivity. Eco-design, since the 60’s, has questioned consumerism, taking inspiration from craftsmanship before the industrial revolution when eco-design was considered a norm and goods such as furniture tended to be made locally by craftsmen using local resources. Studio Swine follows the eco-design concepts of “Do-it-yourself” and engaging the community by making the production process accessible. On their website you can access a manual and video for how to build the devices and create the stool .
Though I desire one of those sea chairs, I’m not gonna be able to make one in this short amount of time. Instead I decided to make the smallest effort in creating from recycling waste material. I was going to empty my wallet from all the “shit” I gathered when I decided to use it as my “waste” material.
So I limited my self to this source material and one tool
I intended to make jewelery or at least functional objects but I’m not a designer so it resulted in something else…
