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In this newsletter:
- Feature: A seaweed chair that could become a design revolution
- Catch up on the LA Mayor’s race with a debate-week debrief
- Deep cuts with a historian of McCabe’s Guitar Shop
- Are rolling sidewalk delivery robots taking jobs?
- Better late than never: LA plans to fix its infrastructure
- Locally sourced gold at this Santa Monica jeweler
Can a seaweed chair support your weight …
and a design revolution?
by Brandon R. Reynolds
Design can be an ugly business.
“It's actually hard to find good seaweed, fresh seaweed, seaweed that isn't infested with flies,” says Punchi Durongdej. “And especially California, LA shores? Awful. Like, don't even think about it.”
Durongdej is a student in a new course at ArtCenter College of Design focusing on, yep, seaweed. Over 14 weeks, students explored the design potential of seaweed and algae (which is what seaweed is made of). All in service of getting at a question posed by architect David Martin, an ArtCenter trustee who sponsored this class:
“How can you make a chair out of seaweed?”
This isn’t just about building a better chair; it’s also about building a better world.
Tejas Lokhande, Punchi Durongdej, and EJ Ko mix algae with coffee grounds to see what they can make out of this unholy latte. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds/KCRW.
“We all know that the whole world has been polluted with plastic,” ArtCenter instructor Kristine Upesleja, a designer working on innovative materials, tells me on a visit to the classroom. Alternatives are needed.
Here’s the thing: plastic sure is useful. You can do basically anything with it. That’s handy for design, where normally you start with the end product and then find a material that’ll get you there.
“But this is a very different way,” says another instructor, environmental designer Stella Hernandez. For this class, “let's start with the material and let the material talk to us to see what could be.”
Which turns out to be tricky for exactly the reason it’s appealing: Algae is designed, by God or evolution or both, to return to nature. Plastic never goes away, as a molecular geneticist named Steve Mayfield explained, describing why we’re drowning in polyethylene and polypropylene and polyfluoroalkyl:
“Those are chemical-made bonds that don't exist in nature,” he says. “And if the bonds between them don't exist in nature, they're going to stay around for thousands of years.”
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Mayfield has worked with algae for decades. He started companies that used algae to create cancer-fighting molecules, biofuels, and Omega-3s. His latest endeavor, Algenesis, uses algae oil and similar compounds to make biodegradable monomers to then sell to other companies. The company also makes biodegradable shoes.
This is Mayfield’s solution to the permanence of plastic: “Let's make plastics that have bonds that exist in nature.” Make it biodegradable. Simple, right?
Not to shoe companies that hear “biodegradable” and think “banana peel.”
“One of the guys from Adidas told me, ‘Well, aren't you worried that people's feet are gonna turn black?’” Mayfield says. “We'd be like, ‘Well, it doesn't do that.’ … Wood is biodegradable, but that doesn't mean your furniture biodegrades while you're eating at your kitchen table.”
He thinks opinions in the industry are changing, though, out of fear of microplastics in clothes, packaging, toys, car tires — all of them shedding stuff that may be really bad for us.
We need better stuff to replace that bad stuff.
ArtCenter students transformed seaweed into light fixtures. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds/KCRW.
Some of that better stuff may be here at the ArtCenter: fabrics and transparent film and cool lamps. And, yes, small models of what may someday be a seaweed chair you can sit in. Right now they’re too little and flimsy and smelling of low tide. But if designers keep playing with the algae, maybe someday we’ll all sit a little easier.
A tiny model is sitting pretty, but what about the rest of us? Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
