A Possible Future:

Materials & Method

I often pause to take in the objects that surround me, and one of the first features that catches my attention is their materiality. In the current social climate, that thought is often accompanied by wondering how “sustainable” the object actually is; whether the material is of natural origin, how far the material had to travel in its and the object’s production, how much water was spent in its production, whether the material will biodegrade or be easily recycled into reuse… The inquiries, doubts, and complexities are endless. This project was borne of my desire to understand the role played by materiality in the making of a technical artifact.

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What is the nature of the relationship between the creation of technical artifacts and the materials and methods that created them?

Originally, I wanted to explore several “sustainable” materials, how they compared to their more “standard” counterparts, and attempt to visualize the information as it was being embedded into the object. As the project progressed, I chose to narrow my exploration to sustainable leather substitutes, and to use the form of “wallet” as a manageable, reproducible form. As a result of bumps in the road and general fluctuations in the making process, I instead ended up with a two-part project:

I. Mycelium as a raw, made material

An introduction to DIY sustainable material creation, exploration of the layer of information / independent technical artifact
that is the design, creation, processing and production of a raw material. Then, proceeding to use this material to make
an(other) technical artifact and how this process embeds the material’s information as a layer into the resulting object.

II. Bespoke Wallets

Exploring the world of bespoke design via user research, testing, and prototyping, and how having one specific individual as a target user changes the creation of, and information embedded in, the resulting technical artifact