Week 17 The Green Lab

Brief: Recreating an object with green material

Group Partners: Tracie, Alex Li, Lulu, Chun

Day 1:

After the lecture, we had a few knowledge about Algae. We were asked to come out with some closed loop. Which means think about a product or an organism, how did it been made, how did it get developed/grew up, how it ended up.

After that, we followed instructions and making the Gelatin and Agar sheets, which are all eco-friendly materials and easy to be recycled.

The key points of making those sheets are they need time to become solid and hard, which usually required 12 hours. We thought the sheet could be thick and stiff. Based on that assumption, when we were thinking about designing a product, we have come through many different objects such as decorations, cosmetics, garbage bags, phone cases, gloves, tablewares.

After discussing it together, we decided to choose the phone case as our products. Simply because it is close to everybody if you have a phone, then you mostly would need a phone case. Also, the phone case usually costs little but made of plastic and silicon. It's necessary to have a reusable phone case.

In our first step design (it's more like an assumption since at this moment we have not got the agar and gelatin sheets.)

The new generation of the phone case should be "Adjustable"

1. LEGO

The phone case could be made by several LEGO-like bricks so that they can combine together.

2. Stretched

Agar is smooth and soft, also could be stretched a little. Gelatin touched more like jelly.

3. Belt buckle

Made it like a belt that could be adjusted within different sizes.

Day 2：

Magic happened.

When we saw our algae sheets, they are entirely different from what we imagined.

For the agar sheet, they were too thin and smoothie, which cannot be hard enough for making a phone case. For the gelatin sheet, due to the shape of out mode, it became a sheet with different thickness (thick in the middle, but thin at edges.)

After checking the characteristics of algae sheets, we think that it is not possible to make it as adjustable as we thought. Due to the material would be dissolved in water and reshaped when it got heated, we thought directly to let it 'remade.'

We were trying to use the gelatin to build a phone case as our prototype. Just to make sure that the material is able to make it.

Day 3:

Tragic happened.

We put a phone case on the surface of the gelatin liquid as a mode, assume it will get dried. And we could have a phone case shape of gelatin, however, it did not work well.

We asked about the feasibility with Anoushka, which is the curator of Green Lab. She answered that the gelatin should be able to make a phone case, but we may need better technology of making the mode.

By the time that we failed in making the phone case, the gelatin fluid came into the phone case. We start to think about how it would be possibly realized in the future.

The 'adjustable phone case' would be a phone case made by 'adjustable phone making mode'.

The closed-loop of the product would be:

Presentation:

Product Showcase:

This week put me into the product design field, which I have a rare experience. Two of my teammates have a background on it, and they came out with great ideas. Using green materials replacing plastic and silicon materials could help the earth save more resources and support to fix the climate change emergency. The green phone case is absolutely realizable in the future. Thanks for Green Lab tutors and my teammates.