As part of the EU funded OD&M project (Open Design & Manufacturing) Green Lab ran a 6 week live brief for students studying MA Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins.
The brief challenged students to explore native seaweeds and algae's, speculating their potential role in creating a more sustainable future.
SEAWEED refers to several species of macroscopic, multi cellular macro algae. This algae is classified into 3 groups: Red algae, Brown algae and Green algae - each with there own varying material properties.
Seaweed plays an important role in our ecosystem - providing marine habitats, capturing CO2 and producing oxygen, providing nutrition and more recently with research into its properties as a biofuel, biomedicine and bioremediation.
We encouraged students to take a hand's on approach to tackling this project, working directly with available seaweeds and researching its material properties. Basing the project in London we worked with readily available dried seaweeds as well as collecting fresh seaweeds from the South Easts Coasts.
We visited Margate and skincare brand Haeckels to learn from a company that built it's entire ethos of utilising abundant native seaweeds, building sustainable products that promote localised manufacturing.
My own initial research making materials from seaweeds, 2018
Visiting Margate, Foraging for Seaweed and Visiting the Haeckels factory and hearing from there founder, Dom, 2018
MA Industrial Design students working on and presenting there Future Algae projects, 2018