Project Title: Lil Sprouts
The Designer: Rives Matson
Concept: Experiential learning is a very powerful tool that creates new associations and introduces topics that may not have been discussed with more traditional learning methods. When we are children we are exploring with questions and our own small scale experiments, making connections that will last with us forever. What if the objects we interact with every day could open up conversations around conservation, the planet, composting, and waste? What if we utilized this "sponge-like" moment in our lives to build habits that will better the planet that we will grow up in?
For this project I wanted to explore creating a wearable for children that becomes a learning tool to talk about waste and composting. I have chosen shoes for a person between the ages of 2-5 as the object because a child will grow out of 4 sizes of shoes every year making children shoes a consumable product that is currently being made of materials exist for thousands of years. What makes this design a learning tool is that hidden in the shoe sole will be seeds of different plants that once in contact with water and soil when the shoe is taken apart and buried, will grow a plant. This experience gives space for a child to learn about mycelium, biodegradable products, a product’s life, composting, and our place as stewards of the planet while at the same time rewarding that behavior with a plant they had grown from an object they no longer have use for.
This project is a two part endeavor with both the construction of the shoe using mycelium materials as well as creating communication tools in either the shoe design or the packaging to instruct/inform the user (the parent/guardian/or child) on why how to dispose of the shoes at the end of their life.
Defining the problem: Rives’ work focuses problem driven solutions that centers on the user’s experience to create engaging products that create space for conversation and inspiration. Her work in designing educational workshops and interactive tools for others to explore topics from institutional hierarchy, nuclear weapons, sustainability, and national security all prioritize experiential learning as a way to make these topics approachable and personal to the user.
Material: For the Lil Sprouts, material exploration to understand the capabilities for shaping and sewing was the main focus. The goal was to replace as much plastic in children's shoes with Ecovative’s mycelium technology to achieve a 100% biodegradable product. Upon receiving samples of various foam densities and deconstructing several existing shoes, Rives began exploring methods of manipulating the mycelium material to replace materials like plastic filler in quilting and plastic soles. Different densities of foams were shredded and combined with bioplastic to form soles that gained a softer but more structural feel when using the shredded foams in the mixture. Laminating sheets of foams were also explored using protein adhesives to test more ways of shaping the foams into a sole. Because the laminating process only included Evocative foam and an adhesive, other tests were needed to explore how to make this material water resistant by utilizing different waxes and plant based sealers. For the upper, lower density mycelium foam in both solid sheet and shredded form were sewn in between layers of fabric to give more structural integrity to the upper as well as giving the shoe the softer aesthetic of a quilted material. Different densities and number of sheets were explored to better understand what the different qualities of the foams gave and how they changed the appearance and sturdiness of the shoes. While still in the process of further exploring the capabilities of mycelium foams and leathers, the materials have also been applied directly to shoes and user tested to expose more information about how these materials perform.
About the Designer: Rives Matson is an interaction designer based in Providence who has received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Rhode Island School of Design with a focus in Industrial Design working in national security, sustainable products, and human-centered design. Since graduation, she has had experience designing in various spaces from boutique consultancies to agencies to start-up studios to National Lab. Rives designs with a collaborative approach utilizing strategy and user research to outline the goals and define the problem space of each project to find the most impactful, elegant solution to every problem.
