role models contest: innovative material design

Parsons School of Design’s Healthy Materials Lab, built on its tradition of experimentation and material excellence, has attracted their most robust crop of submissions to date for its seventh annual Role Models Contest. Received from seven countries, the roughly 75 entries were submitted by students with backgrounds ranging from architecture and industrial design to bioscience and psychology. All of the projects challenge commercial, marketplace standards with exemplary innovation.

“Many of this year’s contestants demonstrated clear thinking about social and environmental justice intertwined with material health––many aimed to solve multiple problems with their design proposal,” says Jonsara Ruth, design director at the Healthy Materials Lab. “The winners’ material innovations were part of proposing systemic changes.”

• Grand prize winner Felix Sagar presented Filter Cake Cob, a chalk-based regeneration system. Using the defunct Shoreham Cement Works building in Sussex county, England as a model Sagar proposes using materials diverted from the local waste stream to rehabilitate dilapidated buildings. This particular solution utilizes “waste chalk filter cake” mixed with straw to make new walls for the derelict space.

• The prospect of regenerative materials is also present in Grand prize-winning Cocua, by Diana Marcela Romero Millan. The plant matter and its namesake are derived from the pith of the Colombian Arboloco plant––a spongy white tissue lining the rind of plants like citrus fruits. It is an unexplored Andean resource whose manufacturing processes and practical application have not been documented, until now. The project proves this underutilized, bio-based material is a viable plastic replacement.