Sustainable designers 1: Shinwei Rhoda Yen

Googling "Sustainable design in Göteborg" I ran into some young designers that are working with this. I decided to contact them and fortunately enough some of them replied. Shinwei even chose to meet up for a chat.

So you too can have a glimpse of what she has done, visit her webpage here.
On this post, however, I want to draw your attention to her wooden garden bench "mushrooms ate my furniture".

 

detail of 'mushrooms ate my furniture'
image © designboom

There is no complex LCA needed to realize that this piece of furniture has the complete life cycle accounted for. For me, the importance this design has is it's simplicity and accuracy to bring attention to important issues. It is a showcase product that leads the observer into refection about planned obsolescence, material's origins and life cycles.

When I asked Shinwei about this project she told me it was done during a semester course about sustainable design she had while studying in HDK. She recalled it was interesting to learn about mushrooms and consult with a professor in Biology to be able to use mushroom's spawns. This teacher initially didn't understand why Shinwei wanted to plant fungus into a bench, but responded all her questions and helped her on the subject. After seeing the final product the biologist was converted and commented that now he thought it was a great idea!