ALGAE PATTERN

Useful information

Team members: Maria Mayer
Country: Germany
Keywords: Beauty of color Natural surface manipulation Circular Fashion and Textile Design Sustainable Rethink Materialdesign Natural color Circular Color Algae is Future

Short Description

Circular and sustainable design process in the textile and fashion sector.

Detailed Description

Alge Pattern is a vision of the future to give new impetus to tried-and-tested systems in the textile industry and to permit circular design processes in the clothing and home textiles sector.

The colouring of our textiles is a toxic and enormously polluting process in the textile industry. But colour and pattern are omnipresent and of great importance to us humans as sensory beings.

For a sustainable surface manipulation with a focus on patterning, I have created a process to create a printing paste made of algae flour out of old dye baths to relieve the waste water and thus integrate it into a circular design process. Thus, the fast-growing and easy-to-recover raw material of red algae offers an innovative possibility for pattern design.

The dye baths were made of turmeric, cochineal and jasmine blossom to focus on the power of natural colours. To preserve them in our senses in contrast to the standardized and categorized synthetic coloring that are 100% used for industry.

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?: The current textile industry is highly stressful for our society and especially for the local population and workers in the factories. The chemical waste from the paint industry enters people's daily lives without filters. For us it is hardly imaginable to perceive our health as burdening. For the local people it is everyday life. I want to stimulate new impulses to rethink the old processes of industrialization and find new ways to relieve our world and our fellow human beings.

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: By the sustainable process of using actual waste water to develop printing pastes I see a great chance for circular design. Especially with ingredients that are harmless in the processing and recycling process.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?: The impulse to perceive colour design as a sustainable process should also stimulate us to rethink the small steps of the complete production, also for us as consumers. It is not enough to think only about who sews our clothes, but what means textile and clothes as a whole package. How is it created, what resources are used for it. Because the textile chain is long and many are not aware of it.