The Polyfloss factory recycles polypropylene into an easily transformable material
Droog Lab’s Material Furniture Fair suggests sustainable shops of the future
Miriam Ribul (TED Research Assistant) :
I was at the Milan Furniture Fair last month and I was definitely motivated to walk all those miles around the city as I encountered some great new work.
Some of most innovative work, as is often the case, was the student or graduate projects. A splendid example of this was the work from the RCA’s Paradise exhibition and Eindhoven’s ‘50 Graduate Projects that have a firm connection with life and the desire to make sense of it‘. Many of these projects raised questions about time and scarcity of resources (material or economic), the will to solve local problems or to innovate in material futures or simply in human connections.
It was also great to see Milan’s furniture fair thrive with maker-labs and design activists. Domus presented workshops and an exhibition focused on DIY. Amongst the workshops was Openwear innovator and activist Zoe Romano (the same morning she ran a student workshop with our BA Textiles students via Skype), and her space was thriving with young designers passionate about her work.
Zoe believes that exploitation within the fashion and textile industry does not only lie within the supply chain, but also in un- or under-paid young designers. Her mission is a call for collaboration and small innovation hubs, where tools and workshop space is shared, and she aims to promote an alternative fashion system.
This was also demonstrated in the maker-lab of We Creative People. They had beautifully organised workshops, as well as special dinners with the locals. They had also created a great system of mapping the local area to identify how a designer can improve a part of the city.
On the future of material, Droog Lab showcased The Material Fair of the Future, with real and fake ideas for how the future will be. The show questioned the environmental concerns of our time, and tried to subvert or enhance this with campaigns and fake advertisements of the future. Next to this, Droog exhibited real work which left the visitor unsure about where the line between reality and fiction was.
