Week 7
Zine
Material Storytelling
When is it right to tell the story behind a material and when not? We use materials to make functional products and often we don't know where it comes from or what the process behind it is.
As an example, the story behind Fair Trade coffee is that the farmers in Colombia harvest the coffee berries, which are processed into beans and traded so that they are available in the store for the consumer. With Fair Trade products, the company shows the consumer how it is made and that the farmers get a share of the percentage of the coffee that they buy in the store. By doing this it may sell better. What the consumer does with it is up to him to finish the story.
A company like McDonald's likes to talk about the beef they use in their burgers. They say that the cows have had a good life and in their beef there is no other processed stuff. On the other hand, the chicken nuggets are concealed how they are made. The chicken they use is so fattened that it contains a lot of meat and it is cheaper to buy per chicken and the average consumer is against it, but McDonald's does not tell that as quickly because the consumer might not want to buy it. As hard as the truth may be, it is sometimes wise not to tell the whole story behind a product or material.
Reflection
I had a hard time working with bioplastics. I often got nauseous which made it very slow. After every example I made I had to take a break. I had enough material and it was fun to experiment with what I had at home. I didn't have a scale that made it difficult, but Summer had helped me from a distance by saying the amount of which ingredient is in a tea spoon.
Most of the time I had no idea what I was making and what would come out and I actually liked it. Because we still had to work from home, I asked my roommate to assist me with the material properties and it was quite hard to explain what everything was.
What I'm going to take with me from this week is to reflect on materials where it comes from and what the story and process behind it is. It was also interesting to think about other applications that could be created by using different kind of plastics.
It has created an awareness in me of the usage of materials.
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