Ideas and the Matter: What will we be made of and what will the world be made of?

di Chiara Catgiu

Finally, the book born from the compendium of Madec’s one-year research is out.

Contributors come from several and diverse disciplines (medicine, biotechnology, engineering, art, anthropology, architecture and design), which design thoughts are fed by.

What will we be made of and what will the world be made of? Sciences and technologies are extending design fields, modifying materials and everything that surround us, even our body, redefining on a perceptive level the boundary between things and us.

To identify the actual evolution of the relationship between sciences, knowledge and design, Madec (Material Design Culture Research Centre) of Politecnico di Milano, started in 2014 a wide debate with a series of contributions about innovation trajectories with well known scholars of many disciplines, researchers, professionals and companies.

This public debate, entitled “Ideas and the matter” opens new options for design action today, new ideas, and the definition of design approaches, contributing to the development of a new methodology of creativity-driven material innovation that, in a world full of opportunities but also problems to be solved, helps design to play a role of “giving new meanings”, through designing materials and things with a critical approach.

This is a mission designers cannot abdicate, following the successes of “Design Thinking”, which was opening up to social innovation challenges and achieving creative solutions beyond the reach of conventional structure and method. Innovative materials have been estimated to underpin directly or indirectly 70% of all technical innovations and this percentage is estimated to be steadily growing in the period to 2030. However, multi-functional, reliable, well-performing, safe, sustainable, recyclable materials are essential but not always sufficient for the commercial success of products.1

Upstream collaboration between product designers, material scientists and engineers is critically important to link the market pull with the potential of new materials and technologically advanced systems and creative solutions.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Terzo Paradiso.

iCub, the humanoid robot developed at IIT as part of the EU Project RobotCub.

Ecovative Design, Mushroom Packaging, 2015.

Austeja Platukyte, That’s it, biodegradable packaging from algae-based material, 2016.

Amy Karle, Regenerative Reliquary, 2016.

In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity and it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organizations in other fields?”.2

At the same time, “Open Innovation” is a go-to process stimulating way of creating positive change in production.3

The open innovation paradigm can be interpreted to go beyond just using external sources of innovation such as customers, rival companies, and academic institutions, and can be as much a change in the use, management, and employment of intellectual property as it is in the technical and research driven generation of intellectual property. In this sense, it is understood as the systematic encouragement and exploration of a wide range of internal and external sources for innovative opportunities, the integration of this exploration with firm capabilities and resources, and the exploitation of these opportunities through multiple channels.

The book can be bought at the following link http://www.listlab.eu/en/shop/libri/ideas-and-the-matter-digital/

1 https://ec.europa.eu/research/industrial_technologies/pdf/creativity-driven-material-innovation_en.pdf

2 Kees Dorst, Design Studies, Vol 32 No. 6 November 2011, “The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application”

http://www.listlab.eu/en/shop/libri/ideas-and-the-matter-digital/

Sustainable materials from conifer needles

di Chiara Catgiu

The pine needles are nowadays of interest for the materials industry.

Pine is one of the most common type of tree, so there is no shortage of pine needles. Tapping into this organic, biologically degradable resource is, moreover, a simple matter, involving cooperation with branches of industry that use the wood from the pines, but not their needles. And the use of pine needles is said to have another significant benefit, when we think how effective the essential oils in pine needles are at keeping insects away.

Environmentally-friendly sound-absorbing materials, which are made of conifer-derived sustainable materials, fulfill all these requirements. The project idea of the Russian Aotta Studio focuses on sustainable material usage without environment harming. The new sound-absorbing fiber material is in fact based on conifer-needle and on a biodegradable binder. It has natural color and texture that creates forest atmosphere in interior. Panels from the new material create a comfortable working atmosphere in the interior and are a bright and flexible tool for interior designers.1

Also freestanding panels are created by the Aotta Studio by using this new acoustic material from conifer needles. 2

The fibers of the pine needles, without the dry exterior leaves, can be turned into useful forms also for the textile industry where they harbor huge potential.

The industrial process by which these can be accessed and harvested, and then very fine yarns made from them, is somewhat of a challenge, however, but it can be done. The yarns can be colored with natural dyes. Moreover, different types of pine and fir produce different natural shades of dye, which can be used to print on textiles. Katharina Jebsen goes into the details of how to open up the needles. In the process, new types of material emerge, which can be used as the basis for further material mixes. The results of this materials study can, in turn, be transferred to various types of needles. For example, it has been shown that the needles of the fir tree, too, can be used in the making of textiles. 3

Some examples of these new textiles obtained from the fibers of the conifer needles are shown below.

 

From pine needles it is also possible to obtain a new eco-sustainable plastic, able to replace the traditional one, made with oil, in the production of bags, food and medical packages. The grams of this new material were obtained in the laboratories of the University of Bath, Great Britain, thanks to a procedure described in the journal Polymer Chemistry.

“We’re not talking about recycling old Christmas trees into plastics, but rather using a waste product from industry that would otherwise be thrown away and turning it into something useful,” PhD student Helena Quilter, who worked on the new plastic, said in a press release. The team has only produced a few grams of the pine plastic so they plan to work on scaling it up. Once they begin generating larger quantities of the plastic, the chemists envision it could be used for food packaging, plastic bags and medical implants, they told the university. Davidson indicated he thinks that their raw material made from pine could potentially revolutionize the chemical industry. There are already biodegradable polyesters on the market, such as the PLA obtained from corn and sugar cane: to increase its flexibility, however, this material is often mixed with a chewy polymer called capro-lactone, instead of crude oil. To produce a truly 100% sustainable ecological plastic, Bath researchers have developed a ‘social’ capro-lactone material by utilizing pinene as a raw material, a natural organic compound that gives the distinctive odor to conifer needles.4

 These materials from conifer needles demonstrate how the production of natural and sustainable materials are possible without damaging the entire ecosystem and by maintaining material properties at the core of the production system.

 

1 http://it.archello.com/en/product/eo-acoustic

2 https://aotta.com/#/eo-acoustic/

3 https://materia.nl/material/pine-needle-textile/

4http://www.ansa.it/canale_ambiente/notizie/inquinamento/2017/01/20/da-aghi-di-pino-nasce-nuova-plastica-amica-dellambiente_4d99d9da-b

 

Dr. Prof. Marinella Ferrara

Founder and Coordinator

Associate Professor of Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Milano, where she founded MADEC, the Material Design Culture Research Centre and directs the founding research. Her research aims to clarify the relationship between design and materials in the history and the contemporary time and to understand the dynamics of design-driven material innovation. With her research, she has made a significant contribution to methodologies of Design for Materials and historiographical work.

Continue reading Dr. Prof. Marinella Ferrara