Minimizing waste is one of the main ways how designers can contribute to lowering the environmental impact of their products. Although there are many strategies around it, the most interesting one for us is rethinking the materials with which we are working. During the DDP Residency, we tested a design principle of reusing prefabricated items as materials for building new designs. We have developed and prototyped a chair and a lamp using second-hand parts. The chair is made out of old slatted frames that were bent and put under tension to form a low lounge chair. For the body of the lamp, we used an aluminium profile found at a scrapyard. Another experiment targeted the waste produced in the local maker space – Happylab – specifically. We used the sawdust collected from the wooden workshop as a base for growing mycelium material.

The project is targeted at finding creative and marketable ways of using scrap-, second-hand materials or prefabricated parts to produce new design pieces, In the design process we try to think of the products’ circularity from the very beginning – is the solution scalable, can the product be easily disassembled and repaired, materials reused and/ or recycled, how/ where do we source the materials, what will the cost of the product be, and how can we make it affordable without compromising the quality, can the product be used in multiple ways? While solving a task, we’re trying to answer these questions through each iteration of the design, sometimes letting them redefine the original function.