London Design Week 2019; the first stop on my trail was to the Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum. There was a fantastic range of design work on display; from architecture to fashion the conceptual and physical exhibits were very inspiring for a young designer like myself. Every piece of design had interesting aspects but there were some in particular I found intriguing. Here are two products that I saw at the exhibition which I want to highlight and discuss what makes them great- this blog post was supposed to be my favourite but I had a tie.
Our oceans are full of plastic but what are we doing about it? Googling that might get you some inspiring stories but a better question is what can we do about it? The simple fact is scientists have said we have reached a point at which it might be impossible to entirely reverse the damage we have done. With this realistic approach to the problem Volvo Car Australia teamed up with the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, Reef Design Lab and whiteGREY to create the “Living Seawall”. Their new hexagonal tiles are textured to replicate the native mangrove tree roots to support and encourage filter-feeding organisms to live on the artificial seawalls on Sydney’s coast. These organisms absorb pollutants in the sea to clean the water of heavy metals and particulate matter. Since June 2019 over 55 species have been observed living on the wall which was previously uninhabited. This shows how a large company with resources can reach beyond their industry to, yes give them some good PR, make a positive impact on the natural world.
Secondly, I was drawn to Lia. For decades the single use plastic pregnancy test has been simply rebranded with no significant redesign. As millennials have come of age some wooden alternatives to nonrecyclable products have appeared on the market such as the bamboo toothbrush. Now customers have a different option to the throwaway test which contributes one million kilograms of waste to landfill in the United States alone. Lia, designed by Bethany Edwards and Anna Couturier Simpson, is a flushable and biodegradable pregnancy test. It contains no plastic or glass fibres and, like toilet paper, the cellulose body weighs almost nothing. The young designers wanted nobody to be in the potentially embarrassing position of trying to find or hide a pregnancy test in a bin or be discouraged about taking a test. Lia solves that by allowing the user to flush it down the toilet safe in the knowledge it will totally decompose within ten weeks- for comparison a cotton tampon takes around five years!
Both of these designs stood out to me as examples of simple, new ways environmentally conscious designers can make a positive impact. For decades artificial seawalls have been blank structures in our seas and the pharmaceutical industry had just accepted that pregnancy tests were a single use plastic product. The Living Seawall project and Lia both identify opportunities to better current products in use today- something that’s much easier said than done. Lia has stripped back unnecessary and wasteful materials by examining the product’s linear post purchase life. Seawalls around the world could be used to host wildlife and now, with our understanding of sea life and new technologies such as 3D printing, they can be. They’re both sustainable and eco-friendly designs; one manufactured to last for years, the other weeks. The irony of the contradiction with a common goal is not lost on me. These two extremes of the life span of products should be in the forefront of design for years to come. The word “sustainability” gets used a lot in twenty first century design but here it is truly relevant; perhaps an understatement. The Living Seawall isn’t trying to maintain an ecological balance, it’s actively trying to improve the natural world and reduce humanity’s impact on it. This immense responsibility will burden my generation of design engineers but it is great designs like these that offer a little inspiration.
For more information on these two projects please visit:
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