Michelle is a curious designer. She takes an intuitive and inquisitive approach and sees every project as a chance for exploration. This has lead her to combine her design practice with design research. She has always liked learning about the values of past practices and studying and trying out old techniques has inspired her work for a long time. Paired with a taste for science (and at times science fiction) and technology, and a great concern for social and sustainable development, she tend to seek out projects where the old and the new can meet in surprising ways and provide scenario’s for a better future.
Precious Waste
Even if you always try to bring a re-usable bag or a basket with you to the shops, the disposable plastic bag is a product that is hard to avoid. She researched the life cycle of these bags and decided it could be made much longer.
After the research she came up with textile made entirely out of used plastic shopping bags that were spun into yarns and then woven. This fabric forms a big contrast with the cheap, mass-produced bags it is made of. The plastic shopping bag is transformed by pure hand work into a beautiful and strong material that's suitable for making new bags with a much longer life-span, or a wide range of other purposes. No chemicals, no heat or even electricity needed. When this textile is eventually worn out it can still be recycled in the conventional way and then be made into a new product once again.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. * *[This reminds me to plan a few steps ahead, but then follow my intuition and embrace uncertainty.]
Woven Light
In a three months design collaboration at KYOTO Design Lab of Kyoto Institute of Technology, Michelle was invited to do a design research project in which traditional industry and innovative design would come together. The concept was to identify new uses for traditionally produced silk by transforming the material through the use of plastics and designing a range of conceptual products. It was based on the work of Professor Teruo Kimura from the Department of Advanced Fibro-Science at KIT.
"I set out studying the specific qualities of traditional silk and what was already being done to bring it into the present and future. Instead of attempting to modernize traditional products through design, I thought about how to redefine the silk as a material. By exploring juxtapositions such as suppleness and rigidity, translucence and opacity I searched for ways to innovate on a material level, rather than on a product level.
The results are three prototypes for different lighting objects, one bent, one pleated and one folded, suggesting a possible product application for reinforced silk. Other smaller samples suggest more broader applications. Each prototype is made using the full width of the silk fabric, so there is no cutting waste. By using a 3D printer to print the plastic reinforcements, an essentially waste-free production is possible. Aside from structural reinforcement the 3D printed shapes also serve as visual reinforcement, their simple shapes forming intricate pattens when the objects are constructed."
In collaboration with KYOTO Design Lab, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto Prefectural Institute for Northern Industry, Ebara Textile, Higashitani Shoten.
