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Food Waste into Restaurant Materials

  • Gabby Morris

About the project Title: Material Experience Type of Work: Material Research, Material Development, Applied Research Duration: 2 Weeks This project followed the theory of "Material Driven Design" by Elvin Karana, on how exploring how design can be material driven and how to work with waste to find new materials that users engage with. The Challenge The challenge in this project was to create new materials through experimentation with food waste and develop products from the materials. I am particularly fascinated with food waste from restaurant kitchens, inspired by the work of the London restaurant Silo, owned by Douglas McMaster is a chef, restaurateur and pioneer of the zero-food waste movement. In 2005 Douglas opened Silo , the first zero-waste restaurant in Brighton, where they mill their own flour, brew their own beer, source wonky and off-grid plant food, and compost their own waste. Applying the research and theory from Material Driven Design, I decided to focus on trying to create products and objects for a restaurant like Silo. Material experience involves the senses through sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, but it also involves user engagement with meaning (what the material makes us think) and emotion (what the material makes us feel). Understanding how people interact and engage with materials helps designers understand how the material will affect a new experience.

The Process

In this project, I worked with a range of DIY methods to create experiments with a restaurant waste material, Onion Skins. As well as creating the waste materials I engaged users to give feedback (due to the pandemic this was done within my household and was a much smaller sample than I would have preferred). Onion skins were an obvious choice for me as they make up over 500,000 tonnes of yearly waste in Europe alone. Onion skins are the basis of many recipes and used in different cuisines around the world, they are one of the oldest vegetables known to man, with evidence of them being cultivated in the bronze age. Over 40 million tonnes of onions are produced annually which means more onions are now consumed in the world than any other vegetable.
Experimentation & Developing Materials
In Material driven design the first part of the process includes gaining a thorough understanding of the material in order to discover it’s unique qualities and constraints in comparison to other materials (Karana 2015). The first part of my project included getting to know the raw onion skin properties, conducting tinkering experiments and understanding the Sensorial properties of the onion skin. After tinkering with the onion skins, I started to explore what could be created from them both in their raw states but also with composite materials and bioplastics to create material samples. I used a range of different processes including bleaching, baking, rehydrating, melting and setting in resins. I tried to use bioplastics to enhance the onion skin, but made sure any colours were formed from natural onion dye that I created.
User Testing
Material experiences are about how people engaged with the material. This project was more than just an experimentation project to see what materials could be made.
There was a large focus on how people engaged with the materials I had made. Understanding everything from Sight to Sound but also how it made them feel. Due to Covid-19 I was unable to do as much research as I would have liked to and this is something I would like to revisit in the future.
For my user testing I followed the Material Driven Design approach, asking specific questions and recording the findings and feedback

Key Questions:

•   What are the unique multi-sensorial qualities of the material?
•   What are the most and the least pleasing sensorial qualities of the  material?
•   What does the material remind you of?
•   What meanings does the material evoke?
Final Samples

The Outcome

Onion skins are a bi-product of the onions used and are most commonly discarded. I wanted to look at ways food waste could go full circular, from the kitchen to restaurant materials. In this short experimental project I used different DIY methods to create new materials from onion skins; boiling, bleaching, making bio-plastic composites and eventually finding ways to apply the new materials to a restaurant setting.
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Final Product Prototypes
Report

Skills