Plastic: Villain or Hero. Getting to know Federica Marella!

Project: Plasticful Foods

Federica Marella 

Andrea: Which was your motivation for the concept of your project?

Federica: Plasticful Foods is a speculative design project developed by the Waste2Worth team, for the University of Amsterdam, and Amsterdam’s University of Applied Sciences ‘New Waste Vision’. Both the UvA and the HvA have their contract for a waste and disposal managing partner ending by the summer of 2020. This is a prompt to investigate what the best fit for the universities would be and especially to update their sustainability goals in terms of waste collection and disposal.The project began with the aim of changing student and staff’s waste management behaviours to be more sustainable. The project encourages you to critically think about the issue of waste management and  debate it with your peers. If we can change our perception of waste as something which is useless, unimportant, and non-consequential, to something which has material value and critical effects upon our environment, then we may be empowered to act towards a solution.

Andrea: Why did you decide to have this approach?

Federica: The Plasticful Foods project aims to communicate the problem of waste management to the UvA and HvA’s students and staff, in a way which is engaging, memorable, and actionable. This is why we decided to look at the problem from a speculative design perspective: instead of focusing on problems in the present, speculative designs imagine how developments change over time and affect the future. As such, we hope to reduce the psychological distance between the problem of waste management and students and staff, so that people are motivated to behave more sustainably. As such, this is not only a university-wide initiative, but can also be translated to student and staff’s personal lives.

Andrea: Which were your main inspirations?

Federica: Before getting to the final solution for our project the team had different brainstorming sessions during which different ideas and inspirations have been analyzed through different methods. For instance, we used the “dark side” design method, which turns your challenge into a negative one, forcing you to look at it from a refreshing angle. Furthermore, some people from the team were already familiar with speculative design practices and we came to the conclusion that reframing our design challenge negatively and with a speculative perspective could have been the best idea to disrupt people’s mindset. Last but not least, the main inspiration for the idea of Plasticful Foods is the discovery of plastic ingestion from nature to people.

Andrea: What would you want the audience to reflect because of your project?

Federica: Waste management greatly contributes to the global sustainability problem. However, the issue of waste management is not a popular topic. The issue of micro-plastic itself, is a waste management problem. Therefore, by drawing attention to the personal problem of micro-plastic consumption (which leads to negative health side-effects that scientists are only now beginning to research and understand), we hope to decrease the psychological distance between the global problem and the audiences everyday behaviours. This invites audiences to imagine the undesirable possible future of waste management, which provokes critical thought and sparks the debate about our topic. Our Plasticful Food products use believable branding and marketing strategies, to suggest to the audience that these are real products. This creates shock, curiosity and/or discomfort among the audience, which provokes them to look further into our topic.

Andrea: Do you think something like this could become true in the future? Or does it already exist something similar?

Federica: The project has taken facts from the present day, and projected them into a possible future, to invite audiences to imagine that Plasticful Food may be a viable waste management process within the coming decade. This is already a real fact as we are eating microplastics everyday due to their contamination of global food and water. According to a study led by WWF, Dalberg, and the University of Newcastle in Australia, we are consuming microplastics in such volume that it is equivalent to eating a credit card a week! As we are already consuming large amounts of microplastic incidentally in the current day, and waste management procedures are not changing rapidly enough to contain the problem of global plastic pollution, eating our plastic waste may be our only option for plastic containment in the near future. For now, the effect of microplastics on humans is not yet fully understood, as it is a problem that has only recently arisen.

Andrea: How do you think speculative design helps to tackle environmental and social issues?

Federica: Unlike traditional design, whose goal is to primarily solve existing problem, speculative design brings us to question ourselves about the implications for our present by creating narratives and fictions of possible future realities. The connection of the present with possible, plausible, probable or preferable futures makes the speculative design narrative powerful in generating discussions and second thoughts about our everyday life. As such, we believe that the ability to create discussion and debate about preferable futures is even more relevant today. In fact, the condition of the Anthropocene is generating unprecedented global disaster and humans, as a global population are slowly starting to understand that this system is not sustainable anymore. We hope that humanity, led by the new design world and helped by speculative design practices, will work more ethically toward trying to solve these environmental and societal challenges.

Andrea: What do you think is your role as a designer of the future?

Federica: We are living in a fast-changing world characterized by different societal/economic contradictions and inequalities, whose consequences are emerging more and more and affecting our psychological and physical world. Looking at this uncertain global scenario we cannot help but recognize that design is deeply involved in the construction of the status quo. Some designers believe their task is to create a desire for an object/project in the audience, or that design is purely an aesthetic task. We believe this philosophy of design is old fashioned; this is the object-fetishization design that capitalism encouraged. Rather, we believe that design is always political, and yet within the design industry citizens are instead considered just as consumers with the only need to consume more. If it is true that design can both support and challenge the current societal system, then it is also true that it is our responsibility as designers to deconstruct the status quo. It is our responsibility to research, critically question and oppose the current economical and societal models so that we can propose alternatives to these traditional values and positions.

Andrea: Which are going to be your next steps for your project or for you as a designer?

Federica: For what concerns Plasticful Foods, we are going to scale up the project across the UvA and HvA facilitates, in order to disrupt the normalized mind-set of students and staff towards waste management. The first successful trial pilot ran for a week in January 2020. Now we propose a larger pilot, in order to disrupt a greater percentage of the overall university population. As designers, we are going to keep alive our mission which is investigating and challenging the predominant models of production and consumption through artistic and scientific research while defining our idea of a preferable future through the vision of our projects.

If you want to know more about her work you can con follow her at @plasticfulfoods and @federicagildamarella.