Circular Prototyping

A biomakerspace for young designers

Within circular economy, both biological and technological material flows play an important role. In design and engineering courses, however, the focus is mainly on technical materials. 

With this project, the design.nexus research group of UGent Campus Kortrijk, in collaboration with Glimps and switchrs, wants to change this. We are looking for how to implement biodesign and a circular mindset in the curriculum of design students. In this way, we want to develop a new learning framework in which the next generation of industrial designers is trained in the circular economy and introduced to biomaterials. 

We start from the epicentre of design education: the studio. In the design atelier of the future, local organic waste streams are brought together and transformed into new biomaterials and prototypes that are compostable at the end of their life or can serve as raw materials. To give this workshop of the future a place, we expanded the workshop at Campus Kortrijk with a new biomakerspace. 

In the biomakerspace, students get access to all the tools and manuals they need to develop and work with new materials themselves. At the same time, through this atelier, we are developing a new framework in which the next generation of industrial designers will be trained with bio-based materials and circular economy in mind. 

The aim is not so much to facilitate pioneering material innovations, but rather to take research out of the (still often closed) labs and into the hands of designers.