In January 2019 I had the amazing opportunity to be invited for an artistic residency and workshop at DLab USFQ in Ecuador by my very good friend and amazing researcher Cristina Muñoz to work together on Biofabricated textiles based on starch and natural colorants.

Our collaboration began in 2017, through a collaboration fund from the Universidad de San Francisco, on biomaterials applied to textile fabrication that allowed us to work in distance as co-researchers together with a team of chemical engineers and designers from Ecuador. I was in charge of the methodological supervision in prototyping bio-fabrics and assessing the development of the biomaterials, the fabrication techniques and the product design. As the conclusion of the project, I was invited for a three week artistic residency together with a series of workshops and a public lecture at USFQ.

During the residency we explored  developed further the recipes of starch based bioplastics, explored natural colorants, codesigned a series of garments and established the fabrication protocols for producing them. We experimented with cochineal, since Ecuador has large production of this natural red colorant, whose primary constituent is carminic acid, that is made of the dried and pulverized bodies of female cochineal insects and is used to color food and cosmetics. (freedictionary)

The pattern of this soluble swimsuit aims to bring awareness around the “plastic floating islands” that travel in the open sea.

The pattern was made by using a database by the Sea Education Association showing the urgency

Floating plastic debris sampling in the North Atlantic, by the Sea Education Association.

You can see this data in this interactive map and read the article here

The different laser cut layers for the swimsuit>

Starch based Bioplastic with Cochineal (top + skirt)

You can find the downloadable patterns at OS circular fashion

Research references

• http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Reports/oceansdestruction.htm
• https://abcnews.go.com/International/great-pacific-garbage-patch-massive-floating-island-plastic/story?id=53962147
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qcIllBI9iE
• https://www.adventurescientists.org/microplastics.html
• https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/conservation/global-population-implored-to-beat-plastic-pollution-on-world-environment-day/news-story/3666e012c6990a2ef3bfdab2e842ac91
• https://www.adventurescientists.org/microplastics.html
• http://marine.copernicus.eu/eyewitnessing-plastic-pollution-in-oceans/
• https://www.sea.edu/sea_research/ocean_plastics_marine_pollution
• http://www.oceanwatch.org.au/latest-news/blog/5-awesome-programs-tackling-ocean-plastics/
• https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/conservation/global-population-implored-to-beat-plastic-pollution-on-world-environment-day/news-story/3666e012c6990a2ef3bfdab2e842ac91
• http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/10-the-worlds-largest-dump/
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X17304435
• http://plasticadrift.org/
• http://oceanmotion.org/html/impact/garbagepatch.htm
• http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044040
• http://dumpark.com/seas-of-plastic-infographic/
• http://www.bluebird-electric.net/oceanography/Plastic_Ocean_Pollution_Gyres_Garbage_Patches.htm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yG77rRXZDM
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X17304435#f0015
• http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/19/the-mystery-of-the-missing-plastic-in-the-atlantic-garbage-patch/#.XDVVk89KjdQ

STARTS Grand Prize – Innovative Collaboration: Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts that opens new pathways for innovation.

Over the last 30 years, plastic production has increased by 620%.
In Catalonia alone, every day, 720,000 kg of food is thrown away. This wasted food, totaling 260,000 tons per year, is equivalent to the food needs of 500,000 people for one year. Remix el Barrio was born with the ambition to propose a learning space to encourage and nurture new practices based on food-waste crafts. It is the result of a pilot program where various designers learn about biomaterial design and explore projects with food scraps using artisanal techniques and digital fabrication. Remix El Barrio was created in the regenerative district of Poblenou, more specifically in the ecosystem of Fab Lab Barcelona, where designers united to co-produce new forms of crafts from their individual aspirations, benefiting from regular peer-learning sessions, access to machines and tools, and learning from the maker open source culture present all over the place. Each designer has initiated a creative design driven material innovation approach where they identify a recurrent local food waste case, learn about its characteristics, investigate how to best collect and process it, and imagine future applications and material life-cycle narratives.

Guided and mentored by experts from the field at Fab Lab Barcelona, they experimented with different recipes for making materials with appropriate flexibility, strength, and esthetics, and tested diverse fabrication techniques, from molding to extrusion, laser cutting, CNC milling, and 3D printing. Each project could have entered into an iterative loop of prototyping, fed by intrinsic people creativity and interactions with peers, lab gurus, external experts, local providers, and future users. This resulted in a strong diversity of projects with outstanding circular narratives, materials, products, and services:

• KOFI: Making paper and packaging from coffee husks, by Dihue Miguens Ortiz
• RE-OLIVAR: Creating design objects such as lamps, chairs, and tiles from olive pits, by Silvana Catazine y Josean Vilar of Naifactory
• EN(DES)USO: A poetic approach to materialities using eggshells and yerba mate for design artefacts, by Lara Campos
• SQUEEZE THE ORANGE: A jacket made of vegan fruit leather based on orange peel, by Elisenda Jaquemot, Susana Jurado Gavino y Nuria Bonet Roca
• COLORES, Empowering natural dyes from avocado pits, by Giorgia Filippelli
• DULCE DE PIEL, Making Soaps from used oils, by Clara Davis
• ORGANIC MATTER, Designing a platform about regenerative circular design, by Laura Freixas
• LOOK MA NO HANDS, 3D printing cookies from fruit peel and skins, by Secil Asfar
• CIRCULAR GOS, Making snacks for pets from restaurant food leftovers with environmental awareness, by Arleny Medina of Leka Restaurant
• BIOPANTONE, a collaborative artwork of nature´s color palette with natural dyes, conceived by Anastasia Pistofidou and made by Fabricademy alumni 2019

Beyond the pilot, Remix has transformed into a collective that experiences circularity, not only by creating materials with local food leftovers but also by exploring collaboration, inclusiveness, and self-management towards shared knowledge with local actors and global outreach.

The Remixers’ leitmotiv: “We are exploring new practices to stop wasting our time and our resources and act at a local scale to foster more social circular practices. We collaborate and involve local agents from the neighborhood such as restaurants, urban gardens, and neighborhood associations, to promote a local circular economy ecosystem. We affirm the potential of co-design, digital manufacturing, and crafts to reinvent our ways of producing, consuming, and living with awareness of the environmental ecosystem. We claim the need to imagine new models and techniques to innovate with what we commonly call ‘waste’. We value innovative and artistic practices as a motor for social change. We are convinced that living shared design experiences can facilitate the empowerment of territories to implement a circular economy.”

Credits

Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC represented by the project team Anastasia Pistofidou, Marion Real and Milena Juarez Calvo. Fab Lab Barcelona is an innovation center rethinking the way we live, work, and play in cities. Located at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), it provides access to the tools, knowledge and means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything. The institution supports contemporary educational and research programs related to the multiple scales of the human habitat. Fab Lab Barcelona is also the headquarters of the global coordination of the Fab Academy program in collaboration with the Fab Foundation and the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.

Anastasia Pistofidou is a digital fabrication expert, wearables and e-textiles practitioner, biomaterial maker, and educator. Part of the Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC team since 2011 as a tutor, advanced manufacturing office manager, coordinator and researcher she is currently leading the Materials and Textiles strategic area. In 2013 she co-founded FabTextiles and in 2017 she co-founded Fabricademy, a new Textile Academy, a globally distributed program that explores the implications and applications of new technologies at the intersection of textiles, digital fabrication and biology. She also works as a content curator for Fab Foundation.

Marion Real is a systemic design researcher exploring co-creation processes in the territorial transformations toward circular economies and cosmopolitan localism. She is currently working at Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC where she has coordinated the 10 pilots in the SISCODE project, including Remix el Barrio. She is also associate researcher at Estia, Chaire
Bali and Centre for Circular Design.

Milena Juarez Calvo is a Brazilian environmental engineer with master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies in Environmental, Economic and Social Sustainability and specialization in Urban and Industrial Ecology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She currently coordinates the CENTRINNO Barcelona pilot at IAAC and works as an action researcher for the SISCODE, FoodSHIFT and REFLOW EU projects.

The Remixers collective has emerged as a group incubated in Fab Lab Barcelona within the SISCODE EU project pilot. They experience the value of co-creation and open knowledge and formed a group of like-minded individuals who defend sustainability, cooperativism, shared infrastructures, and circular glocalism. They wish to further collaborate in establishing a space to experiment with local food waste and biofabrication with a goal to connect with local services, activate circularity, and scale up by collaborating with open-minded and visionary industries. The Remixers is formed by Arleny Medina, Clara Davis, Dihue Miguens, Elisenda Jaquemot, Giorgia Filipellini, Joseán Vilar, Lara Campos, Laura Freixas, Nuria Bonet Roca, Secil Asfar, Silvana Catazine, Susana Jurado Gavino and local agents from Poblenou and Barcelona.

Remix el Barrio is part of the SISCODE project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation under grant agreement programme nº788217.

Jury Statement

Remember the 19th century Arts & Crafts Movement? Remix el Barrio can be seen as translation of Arts & Crafts into our times, confronting well-known contemporary issues with manufacturing and consumption in our daily life. Remix El Barrio is a collective of designers who propose projects with food leftovers using artisan techniques and digital manufacturing. They collaborate with agents from the Poblenou neighborhood to promote a more local and circular ecosystem. In their manifesto they want to “promote artisan-manufacturing sites and designer/craftsman cooperatives in the development of short-loop products, creating direct synergies with neighborhood actors, facilitate the access and the rehabilitation of abandoned sites, support logistics, and partnerships between local actors.”

The jury was most impressed by the wide array of beautifully up-cycled products made from waste—ranging from dye colors made from avocado stones, bioplastics out of orange peel, soaps from used oil, or paper made of coffee peels. Their initiative, Organic Matters, explores the intersection between design, biology, chemistry, technology, material science, community, and self-sufficiency. It could be interpreted as a reformulation of the STARTS idea itself.

View full Jury Statement here.

Honoring the Earth Day on the 22nd of April 2020 with BIO RIOT! , worn by Jessica Guy  at the strike against climate this past September in Barcelona!

Made with the same recipe of the Coffee Leather Bag, one can find the file to download the pattern here

FabTextiles and Materials Lab participated in the Makerfaire BCN 2019 at Nau Bostic.

The projects we presented were:

• Textile Dyeing with Bacteria, a series of scarves and postcards from our research in the biolab
• The atlas of Biomaterials, a materials library with various samples and recipes we have been developing since 2016
• The algae warrior, final fabricademy project of Catherine Euale
• 3D printed hats and digitally fabricated contemporary millinery from Betiana´s Pavon final project
• A collection of Fabricademy final projects worldwide
• A parametric leather molded bag made by Nicolas Olmos

Check out the exhibition here:

Your waste is my treasure!

Working with organic waste can bring circular solutions  for the implementation of closed loops of organic feedstocks.  At Fab Textiles we have been working with food waste since October 2018 and many researchers through their internship developed and evolved recipes for making food waste biocomposites.  There are already some small companies that produce bioleathers with waste, one of them from Mexico called ECOPLASO that I had the possibility to get to know in one of my conferences at ¨Demand Solutions¨ in Miami 2018.

RECIPE / COFFEE BIOLEATHER

2G sodium alginate
2G dried coffee grains of any organic waste in powder
2G olive oil
5G glycerin
33G water 
(everything is in grams using a precision scale)

MIX for calcification
7G of calcium chloride in 100ml of water

Various organic waste bio-leather samples

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS:

1- Weight all the ingredients with a precision scale.
2- Mix the powder together with the glycerin and the olive oil.
3- Add the water and use a mechanical blender to obtain an homogeneous solution.
4- Cast in a silk screen print frame ( you can create your own using any textile and wood)
5- Mix the Calcium chloride with water in a sprayer bottle.
6- Spray the biomaterial on top and bottom with the calcium chloride solution.
7- Let the calcium chloride act for 5´ and rinse with clean water.
8- Let the composite sample dry in a dry and warm place for one week. Depending on the thickness and the size of the sample it may take longer. It will also vary due to the local temperature and humidity.
9- When the product is dry you can separate it from the frame.

Note: As the sample dries, it can become curved, so place it between two level surfaces and some weight on top so at the end we can obtain a really flat sheet

The laser cut pattern can be found and downloaded HERE

In 1831, Mr. Touery, a professor at the French Academy of Medicine, drank strychnine, a deadly poison, in front of all his colleagues. He survived. How ? He had combined the lethal dose with activated charcoal. “That’s how powerful activated charcoal is as an emergency decontaminant in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, which includes the stomach and intestines. Activated charcoal is considered to be the most effective single agent available. It is used after a person swallows or absorbs almost any toxic drug or chemical.”*

Diagram displaying the major health effects of air pollution, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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Last year Fab Textiles worked on a flexible bio filter design to reduce the pollution of Monterrey, the most polluted city in Mexico. This research was undertaken for an architecture project named Restology, a multidisciplinary project between architects, interior designers, product designers, fashion designers, material designers, graphic designers, electronic engineers and marketing strategists. During one month, Maria Luisa Becerril and I collaborated at Fab Textiles, Fab Lab Barcelona on the development of a bio-composite made of bioplastic mix with activated charcoal.

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Grains of activated charcoal, Fab Textiles, Fab Lab Barcelona, 2017

Liquid mixture of bioplastic and activated charcoal, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

Activated charcoal is one material that seems especially applicable to Fab Lab makers, because of its ecologically sound and purifying properties. It is essentially a form of incredibly microporous carbon, processed from natural carbon-rich materials by applying various gases or chemicals to ‘burn’ in tiny holes and thus exponentially increasing its surface area. The result ? A material that can efficiently filter out all manner of impurities and toxins. A super-sponge, if you will. Bioplastics present themselves as an excellent and similarly sustainable substrate for activated charcoal with a wide range of uses.

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Bio-composite module tests, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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During the material research, Maria Luisa and I tried out 10 different recipes to discover the correct ratio of ingredients that provided the most appropriate amount of flexibility for using activated charcoal as a filter. For this research, we decided to use gelatin as our biopolymer and glycerol as our plasticizer. By experimenting with the quantities of glycerol relative to activated charcoal, one can influence the degree of flexibility of the mixture. Maria Luisa told me that in the previous experiments  with her team, the issue was that the samples were cracking  after the drying process. Probably because the bioplastic mixture was containing too much activated charcoal according to the glycerol ratio.

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Bio-composite recipe experimentations, Fab Textiles, Fab Lab Barcelona, 2017

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At the end of the experiments, we succeeded to have good results, with samples with different flexibility (hard like a rock to flexible like rubber) and textures (Rough to Smooth and Matte to Shiny). I noticed that some of the samples were conductive, an interesting fact that we could use for future e-textiles and wearables.

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Bio-composite recipe experimentations, Fab Textiles, Fab Lab Barcelona, 2017

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Some samples made for the Restology project were sent to the laboratory to be tested. The scan of electrons viewed in the microscope shows that the best recipe for creating a bio filter is one with the greatest amount of activated charcoal and almost as much glycerol as gelatin for better flexibility. The amount of ingredients use for this recipe is 20% glycerol , 28% gelatin, 57% activated charcoal and 14% water. Compared to the others, this recipe presented the highest average pore-size of 50μm, “creating a set of thin porous walls one behind another with inside cavities allowing the filtration of air pollutants.”**

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Microscope scan of the bio-composite electrons, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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The laboratory analysis proved that one of the activated charcoal and bioplastic mixture was porous enough to fix pollutant particles. To validate the filtering potential of this bio-composite, the Restology researchers developed a machine measuring microparticles and gases such as NH3, Nox, Alcohol, Benzen, Smoke, CO2… This two-chambered device contains an Arduino system connected to two sensors : one reading dust density (GP2Y1010AU0F sensor) and one calculating air quality (MQ135 sensor). The two chambers are separated by the bio-composite filter, the polluted air is introduced in the first chamber, measured, and then remeasured in the second chamber after passing through the bio filter.

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Data compilation machine : measuring air particles and gas, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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3 Days try out results, data compilation machine : measuring air particles and gas, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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OUTDOOR & INDOOR RESTOLOGY MODULE

Outdoor filter module : concrete, bioplastic and activated charcoal, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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Indoor filter module : bioplastic and activated charcoal, CEDIM Lab by Restology project, 2017

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* E-Medecine Health Article, Medical Author: John P.Cunha, DO, FACOEP and Medical Editor: Melissa Conrad Stoppler, MD, Chief Medical Editor / Medically reviewed by John A. Daller, MD; American Board of Surgery with subspecialty certification in surgical critical car.

** Restology, absorption of suspended particles through bioplastic and activated charcoal, multidisciplinary thesis, Centro de Estudios Superiores de Diseno de Monterrey S.C., 7 December 2017.

Restology project by Monterrey Center for Higher Learning of Design (CEDIM University), Monterrey Mexico, Architecture Department Direction :

– Project Leader : Yessica Mendez Sierra

– Students : Ada Gloria Gonzalez Mireles, Ana Graciela Gonzalez Sanchez, Ana Maria Vargas Lasserre, Andrea Lizette Najera Rodriguez, Bárbara Garza Saldaña, Carla Ruizvelasco Garza, Cristina Adriana Briones Nuñez, Dana Mayeli Rangel Torres, Estefanía Flores Jiménez, Juana Valeria Gonzalez Ortiz, Kathia Quintanilla Garcia, Maria De Lourdes Hernández Lima, Maria Luisa Becerril Garcia, Mayra Valeria Moreira Balderas, Melissa Chapa Gil, Oscar Javier Alvarado Contreras, Priscila Luna Ramos, Roberto Luis Valenzuela Cortazar, Sara Eugenia Gonzalez Mascareñas, Veronica Saldaña Garza

-> About Restology project : https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/reduce-air-pollution

Article written by Clara Davis