As part of Green Week, MA Textile Futures asked what tools and methods can designers use to transform plant systems into future factories?
Botanical Fabrication is a research project initiated by Carole Collet (Reader at CSM) and Guillaume Foissac (Senior Lecturer ENSCI) with the support of the EDF Foundation and contribution from botanist Dr Dawn Sanders. Students from Year 1 MA Textile Futures constructed a greenhouse to house the plantation of ‘gourds’ at the flowering stage. Once the gourds begin to grow, they plan to apply moulds onto the gourds to create shapes that can then be dried and used a product’s outer shells such as lamps, radios and torches.
Speaking about the project, MA Textile Futures say:
In this project we have explored how we can use ‘the living’ as a botanical factory to ‘grow’ products. Our current manufacturing model is still based on the industrial revolution. A model that is power hungry, over exploits raw materials and is detrimental to our environment. For instance, it has been estimated that the USA is using 4 times the resource available on the planet to provide for a ‘fast‘ consumption culture. This is not sustainable. In the past 20 years we have witnessed a digital revolution which has led to developing computerised systems, digital tools for design and manufacture including 2D and 3D printing and much more efficient engineering.
But largely our manufacturing models are still based on chemical transformation and high energy usage, exploiting row materials as if there was not limit to them. A sharp contrast with the production model used in nature and particularly in plant systems, where ‘new’ materials are produced only using the sun energy, water and air, and where all waste turns into rich nutrients. With ‘Botanical Fabrication’, we are putting forward the hypothesis that we could use traditional horticultural techniques to ‘biofacture’ parts of products of whole products using the plant world.
The project will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition ALIVE/EN VIE, opening at the Espace Fondation EDF, Paris on the 26th of April 2013.
Find out more:
- MA Textile Futures course page
- ALIVE/EN VIE on the CSM blog