Angel Cho, Vikrant Mishra and Ruben de Haan.
Our fourth and last Fab Academy microchallenge revolved around the creation of food-specific tools.
Traditions of crafts have been formed around local resources, materials, and land. These ancient techniques have transformed our cultures and ways of life for centuries. Within these past few generations, the world has become hyper-globalized, industrialized, and digitized. Not only does this take a heavy impact on the world, we also lose our material connection and the stories of materials and crafted objects. Drawing inspiration from ancient knowledges from three different localities around the globe, we reflect on how past traditions can be used to imagine and speculate on the rituals of our future.
• How can traditional knowledge be used to intelligently reflect on future scenarios? • How can indigenous craft be used as a tool for re-imagining and reflecting on our current crises?
- Build a speculative tool around future food-related scenarios.
- Engage people in conversations on how we can use traditional knowledge systems to inform our future.
Each of us brainstormed around our individual cultural heritage based on our native countries to come up with a tool that would make sense. We brainstormed these ideas together and made sure the crafts being used were different enough while keeping in line with the concept. Since we were working on three different cultures and tools, we decided to work together on the overlapping fabrications processes during the week.
'Stipwerk' is a local decoration technique applied by a diminishing group of craftswomen around the area of Staphorst, Rouveen and Nieuwleusen in north-west Overijssel. The practize is closely related to their unique local traditional clothing and agricultural work. In the past years an initiative started to host a website with the aim to revive the tradition by proposing new ways of using the technique.
Since around 2015 a national 'space-crisis' arose in The Netherlands as result of urbanization, industrialization, expansion of city borders and the support of farmers with the motto 'bigger is better'. In the past years this led to a series of literal clashes between farmers-politicians, farmers-industry and farmers-real-estate about land-use, policies on fertilizers, greenification among others. On top of this the handful of - more or less - unaltered natural parks are protected strictly by EU Natura 2000 guidelines suppressing the surrounding farmers more.
Land became scarce and therefore all the more valuable. It's time for experimental alternative ideas and solutions on honest land use.
Source: http://www.staphorsterstipwerk.nl/ , [http://www.staphorsterstipwerk.eu/]
Korea's tradition of pottery roots thousands of years back into the Neolithic period. Since then, Korean pottery has evolved through many different periods, adopting aesthetics that would define a culture and style of an era. Pottery was not only aesthetically important but also played a big part in the development of Korean culture and rituals around food. As clay is the main matterial in pottery, it has traditionally been imporant to find good clay from the earth.
South Korea is among the world's most prominent nuclear energy countries, with approximately one third of the country's electricity powered by nuclear energy. Because of this, nuclear waste disposal has been a major issue in South Korea. The country has previously found unsustainable solutions such as deep sea disposal of waste or shipping it off to different countries. In 2015, they completed building a $1.56 billion disposal facility that is located about 80 to 130 meters below sea level which they are able to store 800,000 drums of nuclear waste before being completely sealed off. As fool-proof as they claim this technology to be, we have learned from the many underground and under water accidents of storage and mining sites throughout the world that nothing is truly fool-proof.
With this, I imagine a future scenario where the nuclear waste starts leaking into the soil and contaminates the earth with radioactive particles. People will still need to eat, drink and make pottery from the earth. What would rituals of eating look like then? How can we hold onto our tradition of pottery while not contaminating ourselves with radioactive toxins?
Source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/south-korea.aspx , https://www.powermag.com/south-korea-begins-burying-nuclear-waste/
With the 'Stipwerk' as starting point for integrating the product into it's local context, I replicated elements from the graphical studies into a 2D Fusion sketch and projected and extruded this from the housing.
Inspired by some of the forms of Korean pottery from the Three Kingdoms Period, late 5th century, I started by sketching ideas of tableware that also contained the aesthetic of contamination. I chose to make a plate becasuse it is one of the most common pieces of ceramics we use, touch, and place food on a daily basis. Also inspired by the sterile and "new" aesthetic of silicone, I wanted to use combine clay with silicone to create a contrasting effect.
Since the speculated scenario of my pieces stemmed from contamination of the soil, I wanted to create a way for it to hold food without touching the plate. I came up with a two latered plate where on the top layer will be the ceramic plate with holes and below will be a silicone layer which will inflate in certain areas through the holes of the plate to rise above. The food item will be placed on top of the silicone layers, effectively not touching the "contaminated" plate.
In order to execute this design, I had to fabricate the plate and the silicone layer. I had to make sure the plate would be steady on top of the silicone and not shift so the silicone will inflate through the holes. In order to make this possible, I designed the plate to have sides that go down a few centimeters, encasing the silicone plate inside. This way, the holes will always be aligned with the inflated parts. After consulting with the Fab Lab tutors, I decided to model the plate form in Rhino3D and 3D print it with PET material, which I would use to create a plaster mold from.
Because the plate with sides would take too long on the 3D printer, we sliced the bottom part and decided I could stack another laser cut material on it to make the plaster mold. We started printing the plate, which took 9hrs total. While the form was printing, I was exploring best ways to cast the plasters to make the mold. I spoke with Audrey who lost two of her 3D printed forms in the plaster because it wouldn't release. Upon further research, I realized I should have 3D printed with clay from the start. That way, I could have either avoided molding and casting completely, or if I wanted to produce a mold, it would have been much easier to do with clay. So I started preparing clay for the paste printer to create another iteration from clay.
With the silicone mold, I used the same design from Rhino3D to create a laser cut file for the form and the inflatable bubbles. After cutting the layers, I glued them together with super glue and used the "Smooth Sil" 50? silicone to cast the mold. We ran out of silicone after sharing the last bit in the bottle, so I wasn't able to make the bottom part (secured with fabric) in order to test the inflation.
- Description here
- Learnings here
- Continuation here