Found And Foraged

In the face of increasing environmental degradation and industrial waste, product designers turn to nature for innovative, subversive solutions.

- Aileen Kwun

It seems to have started with mushrooms. Recall the Living’s Young Architects Prize–winning pavilion at MoMA PS1 in 2014, for which architect David Benjamin created an igloo like structure in the museum’s courtyard, using 10,000 compostable mushroom bricks that each took a week to grow (and that carried a very faint scent, reminiscent to some of fermented soybeans). Still explored by young designers as architectural building materials, mycelia have in recent years been embraced by product designers as diverse and resilient components in lampshades, packaging, furniture, and even clothing. Mushroom-made designs may not yet be mainstream, but they are attractive to a younger generation of makers widening their approach to biodegradable materials.

Treading lightly on the environment, these concoctions re-imagine product design in ways that are not only sensible for our increasingly environmentally tragic times but also sensuous, offering tactile and narrative ruminations on the cyclical nature of life and death. The 20th-century ideal was to create mass-produced plastic and metal products that would last forever. By contrast, a new class of product designers places a premium on creating something ephemeral that decays gracefully, taking to nature-based materials like modern-day foragers, harvesters, and hunter-gatherers. Consider them design’s equivalent of the food world’s locavores or freegans, sticking it to the Man one material revolution at a time.