NEW DIRECTION FOR MY PROJECT | FMP

The importance of the sketchbook

After my decision of producing a video in which I would have interviewed people asking an opinion about unethical work, I realised that I was not giving any alternative but just showing an existing fact.

In my sketchbook, I took many notes and planned the video but it was going to be something not new. Something already seen and reviewed. I spent two weeks finding a solution for this problem but I was completely stuck. I felt really down with this project and I really wanted to change something about it. I decided to review my research and made some more about other ways of overconsumption. I read a lot of things about the impact we cause on the environment when producing in an unethical way. I then collected different material and put it all in my sketchbook in order to be able to explore new and more broad topics. Through my annotations, there was a part which pushed me to investigate further. The use of waste to produce fabrics. 

The importance of the sketchbook allowed me to collect different experiments and to be able to analyse and select final solutions

Online I found a project from two students in the Netherlands where they developed a process to produce a 'Vegan leather' made out of unconsumed and rotten fruit.

Here is the video showing the mechanism used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DecEFxZ3dgw

Even if the video is available in Dutch only, their project really inspired me to look at recycling food waste and reusing it to produce fabrics in order to generate an ethical production of clothing.

On the website Love Food Hate Waste (http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/content/facts-about-food-waste-1) I read how every year in the UK more food is thrown away than eaten and produced. I made some annotations on my sketchbook straight away about how this is a huge waste of not food only but of labour, time and money too.

Food waste data on website Love Food Hate Waste. Author's own.

In my opinion, reducing food wastage is kind of impossible or way too committing at the moment. This is why I thought about a theoretical system to reuse food waste to produce fabric and then 'organic clothing'. 

My sketchbook really helped me a lot to analyse my research deeper and to be able to visualise more relative pieces of research in order to work better on my project and tell a journey which flows through the pages.