New Fight Poster
This new fight poster represents a narrowing of focus. In my previous fight poster, my vision was one of humans and nature not only living next to one another, but thriving simultaneously. It featured a greater outlook of a regenerative model rooted in communal living.
Through learning, experimenting, and researching in the first term I was able to develop a mission that would become the solid way in which this vision of the world could take place.
My new fight now centers around believing in bioremediation's potential to solve humanity's woes. I come from a place where the progress of humanity has left a devastating mark on many people's quality of life through pollution of air, water, and land. I believe that design has the power to not only influence ways of thinking, but also of reshaping our methods. We can mimic the most important aspects of nature, such as its ability to reuse all of its byproducts into new life.
Fungi is one of the oldest organisms in the world. Through milennia, it has learned how to adapt itself to all of earth's adversities and thrive by working in symbiotic relationships with other organisms. It is the digestive system of our earth and the reason that earthly beings are capable of living on this planet. It has had to live and remediate through all sorts of planetary disasters, from meteor strikes to ice ages.
There is no reason to believe that it cannot aid us in our fight against pollution caused by ourselves. Fungi has the incredible capability of breaking down polymer chains and being a catalyst for plastic degradation, it can help us digest textile waste, oil pollution, radioactive waste, pesticides, and much more.
The most exciting part is how relatively new the study of mycology is. We haven't even gotten past the surface on what we know about the fungal kingdom, and there are surely so many things that we haven't even realised fungi can do.
New Design Space
My design journey has been curious, exploratory, and revealing. In the previous term, I've mapped out my interests, what I'm good at, and what the world needs. My interests could be broadly defined as science-leaning focusing more on living biology and microorganisms; what I'm good at is at experimenting, making hypothesis, and performing research; and what the world needs is to close the loop of the consumer's product life cycle. After some narrowing of focus I landed on fungi's capabilities of bioremediation and material development as a method for a circular economy.
This direction led me to analyze the context of my new neighborhood here in Barcelona and how this project could positively affect the community. For starters, I would need a source of 'waste' that could be used as both a substrate for the mycelium as well as a source of carbon to be degraded. For the waste aspect, several establishments were identified that could provide the material needed such as sawdust, wood chips, coffee grounds, and more agricultural waste. The source of carbon would be the material that is to be biodegraded, this would have to be a kind of plastic that reached its end of life.
In my vision of the project, I would collect these materials from local stakeholders (materials that would otherwise being thrown away), degraded them into simple monomers, and then re-fabricated them into compostable products that could be reintegrated into the economy. Through this initiative, one could also involve members of the community to participate and learn about inter-species collaboration and a new way of recycling.
For the next steps, I want to experiment in further depth on various kinds of fungi strains and their speed/efficiency at degrading various materials. I'm planning on working with polyurethane, which is a thermostatic polymer that cannot be recycled, by degrading it and then using the mycelium's material to create biopolyurethane. Through selective reproduction, I'm seeking to attain a strain of mycelium that can effectively degrade and grow into a new material at a fast pace with minimum oversight in an anaerobic environment. I would also like to design a system where this process is streamlined and can be easily replicated. This way, the design can be scaled up and can positively impact a broader range of people.
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New Design Space
