In 2020 I was invited by Stephen Todd, Creative Director of the Sydney Design Week to contribute a chapter to ‘Hybrid‘ published by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. The chosen topic was materials, and how the are used, viewed and critiqued by some of the most exciting and experimental designers, curators and thinkers around the world. I interviewed designers Formafantasma (Andrew Trimarchi and Simone Farresin), curator and trend forecaster Philip Fimmano (well known for his work with Li Edelkoort), designer Kyoko Hashimoto, designer Susana Cámara Leret, designer Charlotte McCurdy, designer and researcher Tristan Schultz and designers Studio Swine (Alex Groves and Azusa Murakami).
The full transcripts were published online in 2021 as an appendix. The following essay is available in the Hybrid book as a limited edition print with beautiful illustrations of work from the interviewees.
But, over the past ten years or so, a time period I use to roughly indicate the fairly young practices of most of my interviewees, design culture has seen a flourishing of new, experimental approaches. These include tight, exploratory focus on the potential of biomaterials, but also attention paid to the remit, scope, history and theory of design. Effort is given to advancing the power of design to change minds, habits and attitudes. This last theme, design’s rhetorical power in the 21st century, is well represented in our discussions. It is not a divergence away from materials, rather an expression of how materials can work to shape perception. Materials also work directly on crisis; the contributors and I discussed carbon-sequestering materials, the ecological importance of local harvest and the urgency of repurposing waste, but these capacities are perhaps subsumed by a broader theme of how materials manufacture experience. The underdeveloped medium of smell, just one of our talking points, suggests this potential. Smell has a material condition that can be designed, an example of how the approach to using materials in design has moved beyond its role as a substance to create form, and towards its role as a substance to create sensation.
Charlotte McCurdy is a New York City-based designer with an interest the relationship between matter and energy. Her project, After Ancient Sunlight (2018), developed an algae textile as a means to highlight the potential of new carbon-sequestering materials to mitigate climate change. But McCurdy understands this potential to be not just technological, but a social and political potential:
My background before design was actually global affairs and sustainability consulting, and I got quite frustrated in that space and saw that the main challenges we faced weren’t actually technological, but had a lot to do with political will and clarity of vision, and that’s the work of design, as I saw it.
Design, for McCurdy, means developing a better language for discussion of climate change. This is because climate change terms, such as carbon-negative or carbon-positive, are politically loaded and misused, and because basic biological concepts are often misunderstood by laypeople. For example, people tend to think that trees grow from the ground, but the majority of the mass of a tree comes from the air. In her works McCurdy is establishing a vocabulary of concepts, visualised through design, relating to role of the sun as our ultimate energy source. The sun plays a role in everything: geology, biology and relationships between matter and energy within materials. The sun hits earth with enough energy in ninety minutes to power our world for a year. She says these concepts are characters in a story, unfamiliar enough they allow her to:
talk to people for five minutes longer… …and that’s all I can hope for sometimes.
Algae, as a fast, ocean-growing material, captures the energy of the sun of the present, contrast to materials such as concrete or petroleum, whose embodied energy was created by the sun of the ancient past. McCurdy proposes it as a means to replace petrochemical synthetics in textiles without increased farming of conventional natural fibres (on land that should otherwise be used for food crops). The studio experimentation needed to produce a viable algae textile was time-consuming, but even before she had material success, she found the numerous handmade, potato chip-like materials swatches were able to communicate her ideas to others.
I wanted to talk to people about the sun. I wanted to have conversations about what it would feel like to be in a society that was back in a relationship with the sun… And this plastic just kept working. These little, crinkly swatches, that were terrible, they let me talk about sunlight.
The capacity of design to guide a person to an idea associated to a specific material is also a focus of Kyoko Hashimoto, a Japanese designer based in Sydney. She feels the Japanese respect for materials, born from Shinto and animist traditions, may guide the broader world to more sustainable values. Her Musubi Neckpieces (2019) respectively hold beads of sandstone and coal, but rather than drilling through these rocks, they are cradled in a pouch made from Kangaroo leather. This is then tied up with:
a Japanese Shinto knot system called Awaji-musubi, which expresses a sense of care for nature, and symbolises connection between nature and humans.
A number of perceptions are expressed and bound together by these design choices: a resolute indivisibility of rock, resistant to drilling, and the mothering care of a marsupial pouch, bound together conceptually, but also literally, by a tightened strap. The material expression is in contrast to the way mining companies blast, drill and crack open mineral deposits for use in most design applications, including jewellery. But for Hashimoto, jewellery has special properties:
Jewellery is a very intimate object because you wear it against your body. And that gives you a very different experience of the material. It allows for the examination of coal from lots of different vantage points; political ecological, temporal, aesthetic. Coal really deserves to be looked at in a different light. I believe it should definitely not be burnt.
In the use of sandstone, coal and kangaroo skin, Hashimoto draws from local materials, but its design applies knowledge from the indigenous, albeit foreign, culture of Shinto. For Tristan Schultz, Brisbane-based designer and decoloniality theorist, such approaches are important because they draw away from the dominant cultures of modernity that perceive materials as existing as a standing reserve for human exploitation.[1]
Schultz argues the concept of standing reserves has created a “rupture of unsustainability” notably missing in pre-modern indigenous cultures. This perspective is shared by Formafantasma, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, Italian designers based in Amsterdam, who note how forest resources are only partially calculated by the forestry industry. To so would be counter to the dominant logics of industrial production because
one of the main concepts of capitalism is the consideration of resources as infinite.
Contributors Studio Swine, Alex Groves and Azusa Murakami, currently based in Japan, have also encountered problematics of industrial production in their work. Their study of Fordlandia, the rubber plantation set up by the Ford Motor Company in the early 20th century in Brazil, failed because of its attempt to tame the native rubber tree through industrial agriculture. Nonetheless, Amazonian rubber can still be farmed successful with indigenous methods. Groves says its economic viability depends on respecting the intrinsic condition of the rainforest as biodiverse, more valuable in its natural state than
turned over to cattle farming or nano crops… …Rubber tappers can get more for a kilo of latex than a kilo of beef.
For Shultz, such a scenario might be considered decolonial, if it runs counter to the colonial imperatives that founded, and still persist within, the dominant agricultural and manufacturing practices of the modern world. Counter-approaches exist within a great number of global cultures, whether indigenous or emerging, comprising what Schultz describes as a pluriverse.
Decolonising design is about recognising that and recognising that fact that these worlds exist. They’ve been dispossessed, and destroyed, and they’re also enmeshed with the matrix of modernity at the same time, but they are still out there and they can contribute to ways to move towards profoundly different sustainable futures.
I would argue that the concept of the pluriverse and its different worlds extends to history, and is illustrated in the discussion I had with McCurdy about ancient Roman ‘circular economy’. The Romans had street-side facilities to re-dye their textiles and garments when they faded, prolonging their lifespan. McCurdy concludes:
It can be so useful to look at historical examples to see through what we take for granted in our current status quo and to see how contingent it is. It seems unthinkable to imagine living life without fossil fuels and fossil fuel based materials, but we’ve only been doing it for 150 years. We can figure something else out.
Shultz emphasises that indigenous cultures provide the means to ‘figure something else out’ from the different way they perceive materials:
In traditional Aboriginal cultural society, waste would not have been a conception. Things were made of use. And if they weren’t of use, then they were biodegrading back into the land and contributing back into that biosphere. People tend to not comprehend that when they see Aboriginal communities, and the objects and things around those communities. They’re not there because they’re seen as waste, there because those communities see those things as much closer to a part of their everyday life.
The need to perceive materials more closely, more cognitively and more as a part of everyday life inspires Kyoko Hashimoto to choose materials that are geographically closer. Her practice of place-based making is an approach that restricts the designer’s choice of material to that which can be sourced in their local area or bioregion. A key issue for Hashimoto is to how address the injustices of materials that conventionally have very long, complicated and often unethical supply chains. For her, place-based making shortens the supply chain. It allows her to develop material engagements that help designers and consumers alike to understand the extractive processes and their context
to the point that we start to empathise with the material because we know exactly where things come from.
The origin of materials is of interest to Philip Fimmano, design trend forecaster and director at Trend Union. Certainly in Europe, designer interest in biomaterials appears closely related to interest in materials that can be harvested locally and sustainably. Christein Meindertsmaa is a pioneer in this regard, her work on Dutch animal (PIG 05049, 2007) and fibre products (Flax Project, 2008) is mirrored by designers such as Nienke Hoogvliet, Julia Lohman and Violaine Buet making seaweed textiles today. Philip notes Formafantasma’s important influence in this direction too. For example, their Craftica project with Fendi (2012) included cow bladder lamps, and a glass-blown-through-bone jug that exemplifies how their focus on natural materials has been “resuscitating craft and the decorative arts.”
The link these raw, natural materials have to food is worth mentioning. Industry applies resources without discrimination, but the 20th century was nonetheless sharply focussed on synthetic and highly processed materials in both food and design. It was food culture that rebelled against this first with the advent of the Slow Food movement, sparked by McDonalds opening on the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Fimmano notes the correspondence of cooking methods with materials experimentation design: techniques of “baking and compression, kneading and pulping”, and furthermore explains
the easiest idea to grasp with food is how concerned people are with what they put in their bodies, understanding where something has been grown, understanding what the animal has been fed. Has it been raised ethically, is there a sustainable aspect to the way that this food has been produced? And so people do understand that their decisions as consumers have a big impact on the long term for the planet.
For Formafantasma, food may be the discipline placed at the beginning of a revolution. Yet, as popular as slow food may be, slow design seems less present. I suspect that slow design is simply unable to counter accelerationist trends of smaller, lighter, faster, cheaper, and so on, in product design. But for Fimmano, this indicates the need to understand how cultural trends might work in different speeds:
It doesn’t mean that you can’t have fast and slow at the same time. We live in a very hybrid era where people are able to experience two opposites simultaneously.
Digital cultures are accelerating, but there is still regard for the slowing of material cultures in terms of prioritising experiences over consumption, and doing more with less. Fimmano suggests it is not just a necessity for environmental sustainability, but also for wellbeing:
We are ready to slow everything down. It’s almost like the more digital we become, the slower we need to become, or the more tactile the consumers’ tastes are.
I think that what we need to do is really re-educate consumers to understand that, in fashion and in interior products, this concept of the origin of materials and the value of things is actually something which is the only way we can become more sustainable and avoid all of the calamities that are going to unfold in the next few decades.
For Susana Cámara Leret, a designer, artist and researcher based in León, Spain, concerns around the origin of materials and the value of things are investigated though her burgeoning research into smell. Through this specialization she seeks to understand smell in the context of health and wellbeing in clinical, urban and agricultural settings. Her work proposes that smell is the new frontier for design, beyond the ability to train dogs to, say, smell COVID[2], or detect oncoming seizures in epilepsy patients. Smell has a “hyperlink” quality. Smells share many similar molecules in different mixes, inducing us to connect one memory or experience to another. Cámara Leret argues the design of smells taking advantage of this quality is under-developed, even in the perfume industry, and that
there’s a whole series of nuances there that could come into play. For example, are we wanting to walk into a room and call out to people? Or is it something that we would prefer to work at a close distance?
These nuances around perfume extend to interactions with the individual body, which are unique and scarcely appreciated by designers and users.
Examining the impact of industrial hop growing in the beer producing regions of northern Spain, Cámara Leret discusses how smells are closely associated to agricultural practices. Already well known to evoke memory, smell also has a power to evoke heritage. She argues it is a “medium to convey traditional knowledge.” This idea, the concept of smell-as-knowledge, creates a new way to understand cultural transitions from demographic and social changes:
There’s a loss of a lot of relationships that had to do with other types of knowledge, of the land, how to use specific processes to cultivate different plants to herd animals, to grow grass, for example, for the feeding of cattle. So for me, these smellscapes become a way to bring back some of these narratives, and to have a conversation with other generations; people who have lived a reality very different from the one that I’m living now, and to have a discussion with them about where certain processes come from and the way that they’re changing.
Correspondent with the Slow Food movement, Cámara Leret imagines smell can be used as a tactic for
cultural resistance.
… not to romanticise it, but I think it’s a means of becoming aware of the pressures between production processes and processes of inhabiting spaces. How we live is something that is becoming more and more under pressure by the way that we have to produce.
Smell and history is also a nexus for Studio Swine. However, their exploration of past smells goes back far, far longer to ancient geological epochs. Their work Infinity Blue (2018) is a smoke fountain celebrating cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, and its role in the formation of our atmosphere. More than three billion years ago, cyanobacteria was first to evolve photosynthesis, using the sun’s energy to
crack carbon dioxide into oxygen and water, leading the way for complex life…
You get statues to men that have built things, a great engineer, some great bridges. But there’s nothing really to celebrate the most essential things that our very existence relies on.
We love, for example, Roman fountains because they depict Sea Gods. They are a combination of engineering and arts, and architecture, and they also have a function – they’re bringing drinking water into the city. And so we saw Infinity Blue as a kind of fountain for the air. And being a fountain for the air, we thought it would be interesting if it also conveyed scent. It tells the story of our planet, how our atmosphere that we take for granted has actually changed enormously over billions of years…
The smoke cannons of Infinity Blue shoot smoke rings into the air, conveying smells from deep time, the evolving epochs of the earth, simulating smells now unknown to the modern world:
volcanic smells, metallic smells, 400 million years of ozone, iodine, and salty sea smells…
Deep time is a concept first developed by the British geologist James Hutton in the 18th century[3] referring to the vast periods of time it took for the structure of the earth to develop. It’s a concept that also informs the practices of Hashimoto and Cámara Leret. The latter proposes the term “geopoetics” to describe the intersection of design and the ancient past.
There’s a relationship there between the way geological structures were formed and the ability to reimagine them. I feel it’s such an abstract gaze into the world… …the ability to read back and to understand the way these formations came about …you’re looking at a landscape that shares a lot with the way that art and design work. There’s a lot of abstract thought in there and imagination, essentially.
For Hashimoto, deep time serves as a concept for knowing the past in order to envision the future. She speculates how humans will reshape the world through design, construction, production and waste:
Coal is 300 million years old. Some of the rocks that sandstone is made from are 600 or 700 million years old. They’re very, very, old ancient materials. That is the deep time concept of looking back into the past, but where I’m interested is … … projecting that forward to how they may occur in the future. Not just a hundred years, but thousands, millions of years. What kind of ecology will we be facing, considering all of these new materials that have popped up in the last hundred years or so? And in regard to the pace of production these days, and the way that we’re discarding materials in the ground, how will the materials decompose and get carried down rivers, and would that create new type of rocks?
The importance of designers needing to think seriously about time is illustrated by Formafantasma when they discuss the relationship of time to production.
Technology is becoming more and more rapid in prototyping and making things, but the existence and the forming of resources on the planet is finite. You can think about the creation of the geological formation of marble, for instance. That’s a span of time that you cannot regulate. And the disconnection between the reality of the planet and the construction of efficiency is what completely detaches the relationship between what do we do as designers and where resources are coming from. And in fact, yes, we believe that that’s a big deal. The idea of time is a big problem. How things last, how do you calculate where production starts? Is it when a tree starts to grow or is it when you start milling it, or when you cut the branches?
For Formafantasma, this proposition is articulated in their project Cambio (2020), a large, multi-medium, multi-method design research investigation into industries, cultures and philosophies of wood. One work in the exhibition examines the carbon lifecycle of tree via a stack of Ikea chairs made from different timbers, noting how a tree’s intake of CO2 depends on the speed of the growth and the maturity of a tree. In the case of oak, to make environmental sense the tree should grow for 80 years, twice the usual harvest cycle age, and then be used for another 80 years as a product: “But this is not the reality.”
Formafantasma’s proposition for thinking more extensively about materials is not limited to a call for designers to stretch their minds across time. They also propose designers need to think beyond human perceptions, across non-human relations.
We are focused on the fact that for too long the idea of design as the human-centered discipline has created troubles because it thinks that your end user is the subject. Not for instance, the labourer, the tree, where you are from, or the forest where you source materials or the production chain or distribution chain. Inevitably, you are looking only to one aspect in one user. In fact, there’s multiplicity of users, or actors, in that system that must be also observed…
This concept is well realised in their video Quercus, 13:06 by using LIDAR visualization technology[4] to map the structures of trees and forests. It is a form of sight alien to the human eye. Somewhat similar aesthetic expressions are emerging in works from a new generation of designers too, for example in the works of Sho Ota, whose tables retain and exaggerate the knots in timber, indicating the role of capillary action to provide nutrients, giving expression to the life and vascularity of the tree.
Formafantasma contend it is imperative for us to address our human-centred perceptions. Extending our idea of personhood to non-human life, such as animals, but also plants and trees, is a challenging but potentially rewarding objective because it helps us to understand the hybridity of materials. Not hybridity in the physical sense, of chemicals or components, not sand in concrete, lignin in wood, or fibres in resins, but in terms of relations, movement, speed and time. This call is echoed by Hashimoto speaking on the need to consider the constellation of forces that come into play when designing, and by Schultz framing material hybridity as an experience of relations. Ultimately, I propose that the advancement of design this century will come from the ability of designers to know, understand and use materials not only for their form-giving properties, but for their capacities to express relations that make, shape and reshape sensation, perception and experience.
[1] To this extent, Schultz might disagree with the implications of McCurdy’s project that our planetary oceans might become vast algae farms feeding the new industries of the 21st century. But McCurdy herself expresses caution, acknowledging it’s another system of exploitation. It’s basically expanding the frontier of exploitation to include parts of the ocean that are not currently photosynthetically active.
[2] https://theconversation.com/these-dogs-are-trained-to-sniff-out-the-coronavirus-most-have-a-100-success-rate-143756 – :~:text=To properly train a dog,that has never been trained.
[3] In Richard Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788).
[4] A method for visualising distance by illuminating a target with laser light and measuring the reflection with a sensor.