London College of Communication welcomed visitors from across UAL for the launch of our Melt It DIY event consisting of workshops by Happenstance, Skipping Rocks Lab and Thomas.Matthews.
For UAL Green Week, we hosted a DIY plastic recycling workshop in the 3D workshop at LCC featuring Happenstance Workshop, a design company focusing on quality eco-effective products for the home. The event came about as a result of a collaboration with BA (Hons) Graphic & Media Design student Carina Figueiredo.
The Melt It DIY event night saw LCC give visitors unique insight into companies who have started their own sustainability projects and how their recycling processing works and the importance of sustainability in the modern world.
Alongside the workshop we had talks with Sophie Thomas, Director of Thomas.Matthews design studio and Rodrigo Garcia Gonçalez of Skipping Rocks Lab, showcasing their Ooho! edible water bottle project. The event was a great opportunity to engage with staff, students and the public while exploring sustainable design futures.
Happenstance Workshop is a design company, focusing on quality eco-effective products for the home. The studio recycles plastics to create objects that fit to a closed loop cycle, called STEW products. Each object is made in our London workshop, guaranteed for life and returnable for re-molding at the end of its life.
During the event visitors were able to see the whole STEW process, from shredding to mulding. Visitors were introduced to a whole spectrum of topics within small batch recycling and what closed loop systems are, why they are important and how they can be achieved.
Skipping Rocks Lab is a seaweed-tech startup based in London. They’ve created Ooho!, the edible water bottle. It’s a spherical packaging made of seaweed, entirely natural and biodegradable. Their goal is to create a waste-free alternative to plastic bottles and cups. The proprietary material used is actually cheaper than plastic and can encapsulate any beverage including water, soft drinks, spirits and cosmetics.
Thomas.Matthews’ founding director, Sophie Thomas, helped to deliver a workshop. Sophie’s practical experience in the delivery of award-winning, innovative and highly sustainable communication projects has taken her to some amazing places. She has visited laboratories that are searching for dark matter, deep in a North Yorkshire mine, for the Weller Astronomy Galleries project and been high on a scaffolded Super Tree looking down on the beginnings of the beautiful Gardens By The Bay in Singapore.
Her long-term interest in sustainability and materials has led her to share her experience of closed loop thinking with other designers, and in 2012 she founded The Great Recovery, a programme to build capacity and understanding of circular design in the materials supply chain through practical exploration such as tearing things apart and re-designing them.
If you didn’t get to join us at the event, we’ve got you covered. You can still get snippets and the low-down on the evening through the pictures below…
Check out our gallery of images or visit the full gallery on our Flickr.