Fresh From The Field: Kombucha Materiality – By Flying Studios
Kombucha Materiality’ invites designers and consumers to engage in co-design with microbial cultures.
Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.
The brief
The project ‘Kombucha Materiality’ was created in response to the manufactured division between what is innately whole: humans and nature. A once symbiotic relationship, we now find ourselves separated from the world of which we are a part. The impact created by this ‘separation’ is astronomical and has led to issues globally such as ‘Poverty’, ‘Food Scarcity’, ‘Inequalities’, ‘Climate Change’, and many more. This systematic separation is also present in individualistic ways of life. The societal systems we rely upon impede the empowerment of individuals to make change. Rather, they are designed to keep us dependent. We are led to believe that in order to prosper, we must partake in the systems that are harming our societies, cultures, and our environments.
The world is in dire need of innovation. It needs reconnective and regenerative design practices that respect and work ‘with’ nature. Our current design systems position nature as merely a ‘resource’: materials at the ready to be exploited by humans as required. Design has the ability to be utilised as a tool to empower social, environmental, and cultural change. As Robert L. Peters says, “Design creates culture – Culture shapes values – Values determine the future”.
The Design Response
‘Kombucha Materiality’ invites designers and consumers to engage in co-design with microbial cultures. It provides designers and consumers an opportunity to reflect on their processes and implement this connection within their practices. Situated at the intersection of ‘food’ and ‘design’, ‘Kombucha Materiality’ invites users to engage in a microorganic, symbiotic relationship. The hands-on approach needed for the fermentation to occur properly, educates users on how to care and nurture another lifeform. The project asks how cultivated waste from the kombucha brewing process can act as an alternative material to industry standard and a reflective tool within design processes. It engages the empowerment of both designers and consumers to act out sustainability within their own design practices and raises awareness of their impacts on the natural environment.
In the process of doing so, the project develops tools that enable designers and consumers to interact with TIME through microbial perspectives – enabling the adaptation of ‘natural’ time, in the form of colour charts, colour cards, and a colour matrix.
Additionally, the project provides critical reflectivity illustrating the thoughts, ideas, design decisions, and questions throughout the varied processes, accentuating the necessity of reflexivity within a design process that encapsulates working ‘with’ nature.
Moreover, the project explores the development of microbial-cellulose based alternative materials for the industry through kombucha fermentation waste and tests its limitations throughout multiple design fields – producing designed outcomes and symbiotic reflexivity, further emphasizing the entanglement the material allows within individuals, combinations of designers, microbial cultures, and the natural environment.
Furthermore, a design output was produced using the design tools created, material developed, and applying all aspect of the research and development, encasing the material as an alternative design practice within a lamp design. This final design output is used as a reflective tool to showcase to audience members, and the public, what sustainable and entanglement cultivating materials look like within practice, without remaining speculative. It demonstrates what this looks like to designers by; nurturing a material-making microbial culture, applying a cradle-to-cradle approach to design, and designing ‘out’ the possible impacts produced designs might have.
The Design Team
https://flyng.work/designfermentation
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/flyng.work/
Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvin-molina-0287812a1/
Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.
