Plastic: Villain or Hero: Meet the winners!

Some months ago, we started Desde Casa as a way to cope with our new reality. The pandemic caught us off guard and we wanted to tackle the situation by applying our research skills by opening a space to have conversations that showed us different perspectives of dealing with uncertainty and this new way of living.

One of the many results we got from this project was an open call for creatives to re-think our real scenario and speculate new possibilities in terms of materiality. This open call was called Plastic: Villain or Hero, which was a challenge that came up from one of our posts from Desde Casa, reflecting about the use of plastic during the pandemic and the possible environmental effects this can have.

Plastic: Villain or Hero challenge invited emerging designers and artists to create a diegetic prototype that can be part of one of the scenarios we designed.

The first one was called “Bye-bye plastics. Welcome to the new era”, which suggested a scenario where plastics were banned since the 1990s, therefore we had to deal with the pandemic without them. The second one Plastic, the material that saved millions of lives speculate a futuristic scenario where plastic became the “hero material” that helped us to survive the pandemic, so people started to venerate the material by making its use more present.

Plastic: Villain or Hero was also part of PRIMER 2020 where some of the talented speakers from the event helped us to select the best projects submitted by the international creative community.

We got submissions from all over the world and with very different perspectives from talented designers, artists and creatives. Each juror chose one favourite project and shared a video to explain what they liked from it.

We are very thankful with all the participants and we were very happy and amazed with the projects, so we want to open a space for each winner to share their process and opinions on our platform. That’s why are posting an interview with each of the winning teams, in which they will share with us more about their project and opinions as an emerging talent.