Impermanence For Permanence
By Manuel Thiessart and Tina Gorjanc
This collaboration took place within the project "Botanical Follies" led by Carole Collet, research professor at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, where she has just set up the Design & Living Systems Research Lab.
How can we fully utilise already existing products within the food industry?
There are still functions that can be emulated in order to achieve higher sustainability level and guarantee a better environment for our future generations. The project is showcasing how the functions of cyclability and the multipurpose that nature provides can be applied to our everyday products.
Nature by itself offers a wide range of very well designed shapes. They are already utilised by certain cultures as biological packaging in which the food is wrapped for protection purposes. As they are completely edible by themselves on one hand and have protection functions on the other, they comply to the multipurpose function that our project is aiming for. Nevertheless, the challenge of bringing the approach to a more widely consumer society still presents a problem.
As the project addresses everyday situations, the utilized packaging material consist of plants that are commonly sold through food markets. The context in which their application is proposed aims to targets packaging that stores daily prepared products as they represent the second biggest problem within the food sector.
The showcased series of scenarios is introducing possible applications that are making use of already existing resources. However, the designed project represent more of a provocation than an actual implementing proposition.