Material Kitchen, Co-Founder: Yeseul Song

Online resource and initiative for sustainable materials

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Co-Founder since 2023

Material Kitchen is an initiative and resource for sustainable materials started in 2023 by recognizing the urgent need to research and adopt sustainable materials for prototyping and making physical computing and fabrication projects. We aim to be a resource to the ITP/IMA community (and beyond!) by providing project consultations, creating educational resources, hosting workshops, interviewing experts, and connecting with people. Below are some examples of the work we’ve done so far.

Check out our bioplastic cooking show

Sustainable Material Research

What is a biomaterial?

In this case a biologically derived material, is a material derived from, or produced by, biological organisms like plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and other life forms.

What is a bioplastic?

A biobased polymer derived from natural ingredients which may or may not be 100% biodegradable. These materials are like plastic in that they have “plasticity” and can be molded into a variety of shapes.

While researching different sustainable materials, we were intrigued by biomaterials and bioplastics and made some of our own. Making a biomaterial can be a lot like cooking and different recipes can be found online. Over one summer, we primarily focused on creating agar agar based bioplastics. The recipes we found were sometimes missing crucial information so we treated cooking like scientific experiments with some trial and error. This process was repetitive and time consuming and plastics took sometimes a week to dry.

We took great care in documenting our experiments. We developed our own recipes, published detailed articles, and even illustrated the cooking process step-by-step. We filmed one of our cooking sessions from start to finish and made a bioplastic cooking show.

Fabricating with Sustainable Materials

Our main goal was to investigate how sustainable materials can be used in a traditional fabrication workflow or art practice. We applied the bioplastic we developed to a physical computing project, furniture design, and biodegradable packaging. We used processes such as hand sewing, laser cutting, and molds to make stuff out of the bioplastic.

Below are some explorations in what can be made with biomaterials.