Workshop | Zeroing on Plastic: New generations thinking and designing for an alternative consuming experience

This workshop will be a creative pop-up lab where participants will be learning, thinking, and designing for a new sustainable approach to consumer goods, packaging, and single use objects. A large amount of pollution littering the oceans is consumer good packaging and single use plastics. In an effort to complete the communication of the problem (which already includes using collected marine waste in a sustainable design proposal) this pop-up lab will attempt to target the plastic problem at its source.

This will be a pop-up lab addressed to children, presenting various motivating examples of engineering and design from around the world that address the issue of packaging, from biodegradable bioplastics, reusables, recyclables, edible solutions, new shapes and forms that reduce material use, etc. It will then provide some tangible examples and exercises that explore the new methods presented and urge the participants to experiment with materials and design sustainable solutions and alternatives to current objects and practices. Discussing when packaging can be completely avoided and how to address the situations when it would not be feasible to completely eliminate it.

The tangible examples will be demonstrations on how to make bioplastic from corn at home, how to make/grow vegan leather from kombucha and an exercise on making edible single use spoons and cutlery from wheat dough.