From the 23 – 29 June 2019, an alliance of European designers and makers will come together to rethink the future of Plastic. 14 creatives from across Europe will take up the challenge at the Precious Plastic Basekamp in Eindhoven, Netherlands to make used plastic good again.
The Plastic for Good Challenge is an initiative of the Distributed Design Market Platform in collaboration with Precious Plastic. Five groups of creatives, makers, designers and coders will team up to conceptualize, design and manufacture a people-centered meaningful product from recycled plastic.
As you know, plastic poses one of the greatest challenges to society. Once it has served a productive life, it is not just useless, but also destructive to the environment and people. Design plays a crucial role in the way we can turn this useless resource into something that can improve life. The project theme of ‘Design to Improve life’ is the mission of collaborators The Index Project. They are working to redefine design from a commercially driven discipline to one that’s used to improve quality of life — for everyone. Their call-to-action has inspired a global movement of people using, celebrating and sharing design to improve life.
Open Design
Every single product created during the challenge will be fully open source which means that all the instructions and files to build them will be published online as a basis for others to download, build, use, remix or improve the design for their local context.
This collaborative approach is key to the work of Precious Plastic, a global community of hundreds of people working towards a solution to plastic pollution. Knowledge, tools and techniques are shared online, for free. So everyone can start (yes, you too!).
Meet the Creatives
Emanuele Belà (Milan, Italy)
Vivien Roussel (Paris, France)
Nidhi Mittal (Bangalore, India)
Nikolas Kichler (Vienna, Austria)
Marc Benito & Aniol López (Barcelona, Spain)
Agustin Flowalistik (Madrid, Spain)
Milo Mcloughlin (London, UK)
Damien Ragoucy (Paris, France)
Tom Meades (Brighton, UK)
Gisli Gudmundsson (Keflavik, Iceland)
Mattia Ciurnelli (Milan, Italy)
Ana Ferreira (Lisbon, Portugal)
Francisco Gomez (Alicante, Spain)
Distributed Design
The Distributed Design Market Platform is also interested in developing design commons and making open design fair and accessible. A project co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe fund, it fosters the role of emerging Makers and Designers as part of a design niche emerging between Maker culture and Digital tools. It celebrates, supports and inspires professionals from across Europe and provides opportunities to support their work to connect them with new, digital markets.
“The way we produce and consume products is changing. Designers are key to ensuring that this change is one that benefits the planet and people. Plastic for Good challenge springboards off the amazing global Precious Plastics community and asks designers to get their hands-dirty experimenting, prototyping and actually creating new products out of un-popular plastics, which can actually improve life.” says Project Manager Kate Armstrong.
