Seetal Solanki and the material revolution
‘Why Materials Matter: Responsible Design for a Better World' aims to provide the tools not only to understand how material choices are intimately tied to our planet’s present and future health,’ she continues, ‘but also where the materials come from, who the people creating them are, what the materials are made of and how they can be used. The book is a vital report on how some of the most pioneering designers, architects, scientists, and even dairy farmers are colliding, heating, reshaping and reimagining the matter all around us to find new uses for every material you can think of, all with profound impact on the future of our world.
The book itself is split into three sections: Everyday, Sciences and Expansive, abandoning the traditional categorisation of materials as natural, synthetic, textiles, wood, and so on. Seetal explains that this is so “that we get the opportunity to start to understand these materials through their properties rather than type – this will hopefully enable materials to be integrated from the very beginning of any creative process.” The Everyday section covers how mundane, often-overlooked materials (from sawdust to mussel shells to shit) can provide the potential to provide answers to some of the most pressing environmental and socioeconomic issues that our world currently faces. Sciences discusses how scientific processes are being used by the likes agriculturists, dairy farmers and synthetic biologists to shift where materials come from, and Expansive documents makers that are using more abstract ‘materials’ like live matter, energy, light or air to break boundaries of what a material is and can do.
To accompany the launch, Seetal has created a Reading Room, located at 3 Yeoman’s Row in Brompton Design District, and filled with furniture and objects featured in the book. Here visitors can get their eyes and hands on the inventive materials you’ll find on the pages of this meaty tome, as well as perusing an exhibition of one-off bookends designed by contributors especially for the launch. Given the designers involved include Fernando Laposse, Granby Workshop, James Shaw, Max Lamb and Wang & Söderström, the bookends are far from your average 90 degree wedge.
Ahead of the show we caught up with Seetal to find out more about the project included in the book and how materials could help solve the world’s biggest challenges…
Tell us a little bit about the book and your reason for publishing it…
I was very fortunate to have such a great commissioning editor, Ali Gitlow from Prestel Publishing who saw the potential in a book like this and approached me early 2017 to make this happen. I never thought that I would be writing a book when I’ve only had my company for just under three years.
It was an opportunity to showcase and demonstrate the huge potential materials have. Being a materials designer myself I never really felt like I belonged anywhere, yet materials make up everything and everything is made of something. Expanding people’s knowledge of what a material is and can be is the most exciting part of this book. When I showed my father-in-law the book he said to me that he didn’t understand, he only knew bricks and concrete. When I started to explain he couldn’t quite believe that something like shrimp shells could be used as a glaze for ceramics! This was quite an achievement.
The materials in the book range from the experimental to ones used in large-scale manufacturing, from handmade to machine-made, from physical to digital, from natural to synthetic and from ephemeral to enduring. Overlaps between them prove that borrowing from other sectors and sharing techniques can help us progress towards a responsible future that is more accepting of an interdisciplinary design approach.
What are your favourite projects featured inside its pages?
It’s hard to say as I love them all for different reason otherwise I wouldn’t have featured them. But if I have to choose then I would say Ore Streams by Formafantasma. The Italian design duo used electronic waste components in order to create beautiful pieces of office furniture. According to some sources there are more mobile phones on the planet than people. Once deconstructed these discarded items contain gold and many other precious metals, so actually have a huge potential but there is very little if any way of recycling them easily.
I’m a huge fan of what Wang and Söderström are doing in terms of expanding our material world into a digital and physical realm so immaterial objects become more tangible through the experience. Malai – a design studio based in Kerala, South India – is making a leather-like material from the bacteria that exists within coconut water. They only use coconuts that have gone bad in some way, as they would normally be thrown away. Situated in a coconut farm they have direct access to their raw materials so it doesn’t have to travel. They take the coconut water, place it in a vat into a humid environment which then grows a layer of film on the surface of the water. When left for 12-15 days the film becomes a leather-like material which is put through a paper press to give the material an even consistency. What’s amazing about this process is that something is made from nothing, you could even say that the bacteria is an invisible resource which is transformed into a useful piece of material that can be worn, made into leather goods, footwear and upholstery.
Tamara Orjola and The Willow Project are two different projects with a similar principle of using a whole-systems approach to their materials. Orjola uses the abundance of pine needles to create a natural dye, scent, solid material and textile from just one source. The potential in which one material has is never-ending. The Willow Project was a similar approach with a group of Icelandic Students from the Iceland Academy of the Arts. They took the only native tree in Iceland, willow, and broke down the anatomy of the tree into multiple components such as bark, leaves and sap and so on. They applied heat and water to the process and so created yarn and rope, paper, glues, waterproof and fireproof material by charring it. It’s remarkable the amount that can be achieved with so little; these two materials in particular are very common yet might not have been explored fully. The potential for them is endless.
What can visitors to the Reading Room expect?
We have commissioned some of the designers and artists featured in the book to create a series of one-of-a-kind bookends which will be available to purchase throughout the duration of the festival along with signed copies of the book. The reading room furniture and objects look towards a future of responsibly designed environments. Visitors will get to experience James Shaw’s planters made from recycled plastic factory waste, Tom Collison’s seating made from coconut coir, Natsai Audrey Chieza's bacteria-dyed lengths of fabric and Raw Materials assembled pieces of furniture made from marble offcuts. We’ve created modular shelving which will house the seventeen unique bookends from the designers and artists.
What kind of brief did you set the designers of the bookends, and which is the most unexpected response?
The purpose was to create a reciprocal exhibition where the book supports the material and the material bookends support the book, creating a nice little circular conversation whereby one could not exist without the other. The limitations were the size, weight and also price as these were all set, so that the designers could either work within those parameters or push them beyond the brief.
They’re all so unique and every single designer has shown the material’s potential as well as their very own personality – to me that is the most exciting. The most unexpected ones are probably Marlene Huissoud’s very first batch of homemade honey (I’m so honoured to have these special jars) and Inga Guðlaugsdóttir’s and Elín Harðardóttir’s Lupine-based bookstands. Lupine is a plant in Iceland that is quite invasive and the resulting bookstand is a surprisingly light fibreboard that resembles concrete.
How can material experimentation encourage designers to create more environmentally responsible products, and consumers to shop (and live) more conscientiously?
To be honest I think a lot of designers are already creating responsible outcomes, as the book already demonstrates, the difficulty is for the designers and makers to get their materials produced at a scale that feels like it could be implemented into industry in a responsible way. A lot of the time a huge investment needs to be made to get the relevant tests approved (fire safety, for example) so that retailers can use them within their interiors and so on. Not every material should be produced at a large scale of course, but we are at a stage right now where so many companies and brands want to use these wonderful materials but simply can’t because of the health and safety limitations. There needs to be a systems change within the way these materials are manufactured if they are to achieve a scale. Designing responsibly and/or living sustainably is like a diet: if you go too extreme you will probably fall off the wagon and will just revert back to old habits whereas if you do it in moderation these new behaviours will start to be adopted into daily life more easily and in a meaningful way.
Get your diary at the ready, it’s Zetteler’s complete guide to London Design Festival. Check it out here.
8 Andrews Road
London
E8 4QN