The relevance of material-driven design for future thinking: experiments with bioplastic
— From february 2019
The times we live in require us to shift our perspective on production and consumption, aiming at sustainability and circularity. Sustainability is achieved when an action has a positive impact
- for the planet — meaning that is bearable
- for the people — meaning that the action is equitable
- for the profits — meaning that it is viable and doable from a financial standpoint
So, to be pursued, sustainability has to be supported by a system that values it, putting it at the core of innovation. This requires a change of perspective in the design research and processes. Knowing how our system work and how a circular economy should be is different from actually understanding it: designers need to regain control over the production system to understand it and being able to make it more sustainable. A better understanding of the materials used in production would allow regaining control over the products we create, redesigning the whole process to be sustainable and circular.
From an educational point of view, we lack knowledge about materials. Also, we are not taught how to experience closeness to the materials we use, and in this way we are detached from them and from all the consequences that stem from the choices we make in designing with harmful materials. This distance that we put between us and the materials that we use to design is further increased by the growth in the options we have regarding materials. In the last century the amount of them has massively increased, thanks to the research into chemistry and the development of plastic. The need for a more sustainable approach to production and consumption, one that also takes into account the waste we produce, requires us to reconnect with the materials and the natural realm.
I think that the material driven approach to design is really cool and brave: it requires to put the most difficult circular step to solve at the beginning of a design reflection, instead of leaving it unsolved, at the end of the process.
To reconnect and learn about materials, the best way is to experience them and learn through embodied cognition. Learning is not only shaped by our brain, but our senses and bodies play a part in it. This duality is expressed in the difference between online cognition, which is conscious, mind based and require awareness, and offline cognition, which is unconscious, body based and doesn’t require our focus. Studying on a book, coming to class and writing this post are online actions. The kind of relationship we have to pursue with materials has to be unconscious and offline, and falls in the second category. Offline learning empowers a different expertise, one that is based on instinct and physical knowledge.
The aim of this material design project is to create a product using a biodegradable material, created without using chemicals through an abundant source easily available. Living with the chosen material means getting to know its properties by experiencing it in as many possible ways to discover possible uses and, in the end, a product.
Shrimps
The shrimp waste contains several bioactive compounds such as chitin, pigments, amino acids, and fatty acids. These bioactive compounds have a wide range of applications including medical, therapies, cosmetics, paper, pulp and textile industries, biotechnology, and food applications. Chitin is a polysaccharide sourced from exoskeletons: this means that it is abundant in the shells of crustaceans and insects. It is the second most abundant biopolymer on Earth, after cellulose.
Experimentations around the creation of a bioplastic from chitin started a few years ago with Shrilk, a fully degradable bioplastic developed at Harvard made with chitosan (a product of deproteinized chitin) and silk. Shrilk was tested to be used as a plastic substitute and also for creating implantable foams, films and scaffolds for surgical closure, wound healing, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine applications .
Shrilk was discovered to be very expensive to source and produce, but chitosan alone — without silk- became the object of various experiments at the intersection of science and design. The most famous experiment around chitosan and its possible application as a bioplastic is the one performed at MIT’s Mediated Matter Lab: scientists created a wing-like multifunctional structure using a custom-made 3-d robotic printer, which extruded chitosan in different concentrations. The most interesting property of chitosan’s bioplastic is that it is not water resistant. Although the process of degradation is quite long, products made with this plastic eventually dissolve in water. Another interesting aspects of the material is that, even though crustaceans contain quite powerful allergens, the bioplastic is hypoallergenic.
As I discovered, this amber-coloured, translucent bioplastic is also very beautiful.
Experiments
Chitosan is so widely use in medical research that it’s quite easy to find scientific references & articles online on material experiments. It was more difficult to find “in-between” references, meaning some examples of chitosan/shrimps experiments more focused towards design and the properties of the material. Anyway, reading academic papers we found out how chitosan is extracted from shrimps through two different methodologies:
As we noticed, there is apparently no way of extracting chitosan from crustacean shells without using caustic soda, a powerful chemical that we were willing to avoid. We were able to talk about this issue with some amazing students from RCA, collectively called The shellworks. The aim of their project, the only one we found at the intersection of design and research, is to design and produce specific machines to handle the chitosan bioplastic’s properties and create objects. The shellworks confirmed to us that there is no way of extracting chitosan without chemicalsWe decided to skip the extraction step, buy chitosan powder online and focus our efforts on the more practical side of the experimentation, meaning the creation of final products from chitosan. Nonetheless, we continued experimenting on possible application of shrimp shells outside of the chitosan scope.
Recipes
