Handwoven Baskets
Our baskets targets two issues at once, climate change and plastic pollution, through a low-cost and easy-to-implement system whose roots lie in the indigenous knowledge of people from Western Anatolia and the Native American heritage of San Diego county. Products We Promise to Deliver:
200 cm wide basket bottoms woven with 8mm tubing to circulate 200lt of water with an 80% GMO algae concentration. 180 cm tall basket fans woven with 6mm tubing to circulate 160 lt of water that can yield 20 grams of biodegradable plastics material precursor lipids.
We propose to bring indigenous basket weaving and knitting techniques to create photobioreactors, which are perfect for carbon sequestration and the production of highly valuable lipid monomers to create biodegradable plastics. We offer the architectural solution to host genetically modified algae (in collaboration with UCSD Center for Renewable Materials) as a technically and economically feasible strategy to mitigate the consequences of increased atmospheric CO2 while stimulating indigenous knowledges and creating building blocks for a plastic-pollution-free future.
In the world of design and architecture, there’s a shift from building large scale, massive, permanent, high-cost, and heavy structures to lighter, permeable, transient, and nomadic structures. Our project offers a beautiful and simple solution which is not only cheap but also playful to build. The results are aesthetically pleasing and yet functional. We believe with the support of our university we can take the project to the next level where we can build large-scale prototypes that can be a proof of concept for even larger scale architectural structures like walls, separators, shading elements, and furniture. There is so much to explore and we cannot wait to bring our simple yet elegant idea to the service of our local and global communities.