Mycelium: touched by the material

michiel_wierinck 2018-11-27 19:14:21 UTC #1

Hello
I am Michiel, a industrial design student in Kortijk. I am working around a design project (masterthesis) with the biomaterial mycelium. Last year I searched for a meaningfull product applications. An ecological urn was the result of a lot of exploration and tinkering with mycelium. Now I am bussy with prototyping and testing the concept with users. Here are some prototypes I made until now:

alberto 2018-11-27 21:56:10 UTC #2

Very cool! Congratulations.

noemi 2018-11-30 11:18:15 UTC #3

Hi @michiel_wierinck wow!
The only physical objects from mycelium I've seen so far live are the lamp and bricks made by Glimps..
Your different textured coloring seems superb.

My question would be how far do you think your urns are from finished products..? One thing I find hard to understand looking from afar at many high potential ideas is how much we are discussing playing with concepts, tinkering to use your word, and how close they really are to production for a market (for example are you expecting more polishing, more research to make them more resistant etc.)?
Maybe thats hard to estimate, but curious to hear.

Often we talk about very early stage innovation, but when doing strategic work I find it harder and harder to translate that distance to utility/ implementation.

Disclosure: i'm a community builder across fields, so i dont have technical knowledge in biodesign, but my work carries the bigger narrative. hence I find this very relevant!

michiel_wierinck 2018-11-30 15:38:27 UTC #4

Hi Noemi
I am very pleased to hear your interest.
The fundamental design of the urn is almost done. Structural it's resistant enough.
With next prototypes we will test different spawn and substrate and further develop the closing mechanism.
This prototype is an alpha version. In fact a proof of concept that we need to optimize. So now we have to take care of the detail design. After this we can think at a product for a market.

Elise 2018-12-05 10:46:41 UTC #5

Hi @michiel_wierinck,

Really nice work! Would you like to share how you realised the different finishes? I wonder how it became so yellow and smooth on one part, and white and rough on an other? Is it because of the mould that you used?

It would be really relevant for everyone if you used this forum as a kind of logbook of your work (for example like the post of @Ichelle).