#ldf2013

The worlds of biology and industry continue to converge. Designer Eric Klarenbeek has combined high-tech and biological processes to create a chair out of a living organism.

Klarenbeek worked with scientists at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands to create a living material that could be used in a 3D printer. He blended mycelium – the vegetative part of a fungus – with water and straw. Once printed, the mycelium continued to grow, reducing the water content to create a sturdy structure. The designer stopped the growing process by coating the chair in a fine layer of bioplastic.

Dutch design studio Sholten & Baijings is staging an opulent dinner party to present its tableware collection as part of this year’s London Design Festival.

Set in the ornate Norfolk House Music Room in the British Galleries of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), The Dinner Party shows the studio’s tableware in a seemingly lived-in environment – providing a more natural way of viewing design. “The visitor enters just seconds after the guests have left to smoke a cigarette in the garden,” says the designers. “One can use this unguarded moment to look at the luxurious dinner table and the interior undisturbed.”

Accompanying the deserted dinner scene is music by Moritz Gabe and Henning Grambow, who used Sholten & Baijings’ tableware to create the soft background soundtrack.

Canadian designer Philippe Malouin has manufactured a custom-made analogue 3-D printer to create sugar moulds for his latest collection of plates and bowls.

Commissioned by UK-based ceramics brand 1882 Ltd for the London Design Festival, Malouin pours the sugar onto a spinning turntable, allowing it to pile up and form cylindrical sand dune shapes. He uses the sugar forms to create silicone moulds for the final ceramic pieces. The Dunes collection retains the sugar mould’s sandy texture and is finished with a matte glaze.