Polyethylene is the commonest plastic on this planet. Used for meals packaging, grocery baggage, detergent bottles, and a lot extra, the customarily single-use objects are ubiquitous in our every day lives.
For computational designer Xuanhao Li, polyethylene turned a fruitful supply for envisioning a brand new strategy to repurpose the omnipresent materials.
Whereas working as a textile developer, Li seen that the plastic movies lining containers and wrapping textiles throughout transit have been usually thrown within the trash. He started to gather the fabric and experiment with its properties, notably its transparency, malleability, and easy texture, because it handed by way of a heat-press machine. “The aim was to fuse polyethylene films into sheets that balanced rigidity and flexibility while achieving a hazy translucency for lampshades,” he tells Colossal. “No material is inherently unattractive or cheap.”
When Li watched a documentary about sea turtles that mistook plastic baggage for jellyfish, the explorations discovered their type. “The haunting imagery of drifting plastic and its tragic impact on marine life deeply moved me,” the designer shares. He additionally visited the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to watch the dwell animals and their bulbous our bodies.
After growing the fabric, Li created digital motifs that imitated each a knitted construction and the jellyfish type, which he reduce utilizing a CNC machine. He provides:
I hooked up tentacles with various widths, following rhythmic patterns that abstractly echo the textures of jellyfish tissue…For the highest portion of the jellyfish, I employed a easy, overlapping layering approach, which mimicked the fragile, rounded bell of the jellyfish. For the bottom, I used an opposing approach, the place the items have been knitted with the sides going through one another, leading to a ridged texture that evoked the intricate, flowing type of jellyfish tentacles.
Ensuing is Polycycle Illumination, a chic assortment of tabletop lamps. Standing at completely different heights, the designs collectively mirror the adjustments in form as a jellyfish pulsates and swims by way of the water. Li hopes the sequence features as each a useful object and a name to scale back plastic waste that threatens marine life.
Polycycle Illumination has received quite a few awards, together with the title of Design Undertaking of the 12 months for Dezeen China, and is on view on the Purple Dot Design Museum in Singapore.
Li is at present engaged on a brand new lamp sequence product of discarded silk cocoon trimmings to debut this Might at London Craft Week. He plans to focus extra on house and style design within the coming months, and you may comply with his newest initiatives on his web site and Instagram.
