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Edible Craft: Experiments in resilient creative cultural practices.
Mono material design concepts based on food source to design edible tableware for the table landscape including edible photovoltaics are explored. Together with textile designer Carole Collet and the students of the Future textiles Deptmnt of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Resilients is a project by FoAM Brussels in collaboration with Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. More on Resilients > http://fo.am/resilients/
As part of “The Resilients” project team, I will coordinate the “The Edible Craft” case study in collaboration with FoAm, Bart Vandeput and the MA Textile Futures Course at CSM. The design team will explore the table landscape as a medium to communicate principles of resilience and interdependency. The design components will include food, textiles, tableware & dye sensitized solar cells, all produced with locally sourced ingredients.
The project has 2 complementary goals: - to explore how food generates both calorifc (Joules) & electrical energy (Watts) & how this parallel can be taken into account when evaluating ecosystems. - to learn from traditional crafts, biology, biomimicry & food science to design environmentally resilient cultural experiences. - “The Resilients”
The starting point are plants with properties suitable for making food, textiles & solar cells (e.g berries). Local ethno-culinary traditions, biological & ecological context of the chosen plant is studied and a scenario for an “edible” dining environment is designed. The experiment should be transferrable to different localities in Europe. The project starts in June 2011 and will last for 2 years. “Bio Lace: An Exploration of the Potential of Synthetic Biology for Future Textiles” I am currently developing a speculative design-led research project that investigates the intersection of synthetic biology and textile design to propose future fabrication processes for textile products and textile architecture. The project is designed to probe the potential of a biological manufacturing future by exploring the cellular programming of morphogenesis in plant systems. “Bio Lace” aims at translating synthetic biology into accessible design scenarios to expose and understand the societal implications of new emerging living technologies derived from scientific research. The “Bio Lace” project poses the following questions:
Can synthetic biology become a potential sustainable technology for future textile manufacturing? Can we programme and code cellular growth in plants so as to embed morphology into material systems? Will crafting molecules become a new way to produce textiles?
—– People —–
Carole Collet is Course Director MA Textile Futures, Reader and Deputy Director Textile Futures Research Centre at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts in London, England. She has been a visionary in the field of future forward textiles and creates cutting edge research which tests the limits of what we may soon experience as everyday pliable material substrates. With a keen eye for science, speculative design, innovation and environmental engagement Carole took us through some of the design research presently being developed at Textiles Futures for the Test_Lab “Clothing without Cloth”. Bartaku is an artist/researcher
—– Research —–
Packaging the edible craft: “Packaging materials that are 100% renewable, and primarily made from agricultural byproducts and mycelium, a fungal network of threadlike cells. It’s like the “roots” of mushrooms. In 5 – 7 days, in the dark, with no watering, and no petrochemical inputs, the mycelium digests the agricultural byproducts, binding them into a beautiful structural material. The mycelium acts like a natural, self assembling glue. These low-embodied energy materials can be home composted when they’re no longer needed. This technology is a radical departure from traditional bioplastics. While feedstocks for bioplastics are typically food crops, we’re able to upcycle very low value waste products.” - http://www.ecovativedesign.com/