Present

Final Bachelor Project

The workflow of the sensory matters squad that I was a part of this semester was quite different from the way I usually work. I prefer having a clear goal to work from, but instead I had to work by starting with a material. This I found this material driven design quite a challenge. Especially since I like to think out a lot of things in my head. I usually have a clear vision of things that I might want tot do, but for this project there were so many different routes, that I was unable to look very far ahead. The reason for that is that I was working with an almost unexplored material that had not clear direction for me to work in. This meant that I was forced to use a much more experimental method with very small steps in between. I decided to take a very holistic approach to the project, and try to capture as many sides from the materials as possible. This helped me to develop competences in a wide range of expertise area's.

During this FBP project I looked extensively at how people perceive their interaction with lint. I kept track of their responses over the entire project to see if there was a change in how people experience the material based in the way it was processed. I did some user tests and open format interviews to gather those kins of information. What I mainly found very interesting was to put the material in a form that seems that is very close to you, such as a toothbrush. This almost shocking display was drew the most attention during my demonstration. Personally I see it as the most inportant part of this project, since it was able to make people think about what lint really is and how they treat it.

One of the main factors that I wanted to take into account from the start of this project, was to see how it affects the world. I mainly looked at research papers concerning similar of the same materials to find how the elements that lint consist of interact with the environment. Before now I had not given it much thought how the use of a product, not just its disposal, contributes to the environmental pollution issues that we face. I think this is a very importan aspect of design that we should be taken into account.

A major component of this project was to find the way lint can integrate with other materials as a composite. I used the knowledge I have of mechanical properties to test this by looking how changing the lint content changes the material properties of the composite. While I think this is a useful thing to know when determining the viability of a material, it should not have been so much the focus for a project of this type. This is where you can quite clearly see that I am used to taking this step by step approach towards a project goal, which in this case did not work out well.

I used public data in my project to approximate the amount of lint that is being produced in the netherlands by extrapolating clothes dryer sales. That said I was eventually not able to include much of this expertise area in my final results.

While there was not much Entrepreneurship in this project. By means of benchmarking I tried to understand the position of lint in a world where there is already a large indrusty of textile waste. In addition I looked into the feasibily of collecting the lint in the first place.

This is an area that can been elaborated more on. It would be interesting to see how collection and processing of lint would stack up financially against for example reclaimed textile.