Designing Eco-Effective Products: A Seeded Textile Approach

Abstract

Textile production and consumption operate within a broader system that encompasses the intersections of environment, industry, and society. These intersections offer designers the opportunity to explore evolving relationships between textiles, nature, and people in order to foster eco-effective design. The product life cycle of synthetic textiles follows a linear waste path in which microplastics endure after consumption and negatively impact the environmental landscape. In line with McDonough and Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle model, this material development project explores redirecting textile “waste” in an “eco-effective” manner, as a way not only to reduce negative impacts or act neutrally on the environment, but to offer nourishment for a future growth cycle. Integrating seeds in felted wool coasters, the design challenges the linear waste narrative by aligning the textile product life cycle with a biological plant cycle. Beyond designing solely for aesthetics and for functionality as surface protection, this specific material development project adds a horticultural function into the product life cycle of coasters to support and demonstrate an eco-effective design. Furthermore, following a speculative design approach produces a visual overlap within the material itself of a home good as it is used everyday and its potential as a source of future nourishment and growth, thus actively engaging human consumers in the Cradle to Cradle process. This textile development project challenges the dominant model of production and consumption and demonstrates that products designed to work with natural cycles to support the earth and its ecosystems can support shifting the trajectory of human impact toward positive environmental interactions. The study points to the need to consider the longer-term seeded textile lifecycle as a possibility for transforming textile goods into small-scale spaces of infrastructural green development.

Keywords:

• Textiles
• sustainability
• design
• microplastics
• wool
• plants

Acknowledgements

A special thank you to Annika Butler-Wall for advice and comments and to Sloat Garden Center, Clement Nursery, and Barinaga Ranch for materials and good conversation on plants, sheep, and agriculture.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data (Appendix) for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Molly Radin

Molly Radin, BFA is an industry designer and independent scholar. She is a graduate of the University of Delaware Certificate in Socially Responsible and Sustainable Apparel Business and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Her focus is in applying empirical research on sustainable material developments to industry use. E-mail: [email protected].

Kelly Cobb

Kelly Cobb, MFA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include creative textile research and development; sustainable solutions in apparel product development; and collaborative, practice-based projects.