Post—Plastic Series

IMG_9145 2.jpg — **Post—Plastic Series**

**Central Saint Martins, MA Industrial Design 2021**
The Post—Plastic Series is a collection of work which frames the household environment of the *Post-Plastic World*. The disrupted naked furniture aims to generate an emotional attachment with the user by being honest in their artificiality. Being displayed as an House Archive of plastics, the metal frames shows the scrap plastics held inside, in an effort to save them from the environment. The user will then build a long-term relationship with the items, to self-generate sustainable behaviours.
The industrial waste becomes part of ourselves and plays a key role in understanding and reflecting our society, leading to the eventual establishment of a new aesthetic language. The furniture deliberately packs morewaste material inside the frames, benefiting both the functionality of the object and the planet, consequently opposing the traditional manufacturing processes of the Plastic Industry.
While providing the audience with a provocative vision of the future of plastics, the project also explores how future scenarios could feel less alienating if pictured as emotional and poetic.
The Series aims to portray, in terms of aesthetics, functions and manufacturing processes, a possible solution to future design challenges the Industry will face in the event of the end of plastic production.

356.917 Cocktail Sofa / 74.165 Lounge Chair

The two seat sofa powerfully expresses the honesty of its artificiality and its manufacturing processes. It appears naked, as the frame holds cut offs of polyurethane, often used in furniture fabrication. After manufacturing processes, foam scraps and cut-offs, being thermosetting polymers, are some of the hardest materials to recycle or repurpose. Although in recent years they have been recycled through grinding, they are still responsible for the presence of micro-plastics being found in the environment. They are often repurposed to serve the same functions, prolonging the cycle of cut offs disposal.

A smaller version of the cocktail sofa, the smaller seat's frame holds air filled pillows and bubble wraps often used in delivery services and parcels. It is inspired by the largely popular inflatable chairs of the Italian Radical Designers of the 1960s. Throughout the chair's lifetime, air filled pillows are going to deflate and bubble wraps are going to brake, causing a loss of volume and reducing the seat's functionality. This will cause the need to fill the frame with newly repurposed and rescued materials.

36.990 Separè

The room divider, or separè, is framing the aim of the entire collection to oppose traditional mass production practices. Projects designed to be globally produced in large scales often rely on the use of less material as possible, in an effort to limit the after life recycling.

Since plastics need to be rescued from the environment, to stop the spread of microplastics, the more material is archived inside the frames, the bigger the positive global impact. The metal meshes are joined together with metal hinges, making the piece suitable for expansion with multiple units. The rubber, vinyls, PVC and foam cut offs are once again filling the frames, creating spaces in the household environment, according to the room's needs.

1.932 Side Table

Slighlty different in its circular shape from the other pieces of the collection, the side table adresses a specific enquiry related to the emotional durability of the project and the way users can fell attached to their items and be moved towards sustainability and long-term use. A PVC flat sheet slides through the frame and needs to reach the top, supported from the scrap plastics, for the table to be optimally used. In this case, the frame is almost completely filled up with upholstery grinded polystyrene. The gaps are filled with the user's memories, photographies, pieces of their past they will never get rid of.

Those pieces of memories are metaphorically and physically placed at the same level as the plastic industry waste, generating a sense of belonging and emotional attachment. The plastics are no longer distant, but they are displayed as authentic and generating affection.

63.34 Floor Lamp

The floor lamp balances the collection creating a sense of warmth, reminiscent of a welcoming household environment. Cellophane sheets are wrapped around the metal frame. Being semi-transparent, their colours overlay on top of each other, creating different patterns and transforming the ligh. To achieve a soft light, adequate to the environment the collection is proposing, the frame is wrapped with numerous various sheets.