Design from recycling

The amount of materials that industrial design engineers can choose from to materialise their designs keeps increasing. However, emerging new materials such as recycled plastics often struggle to get adopted after their introduction to the competitive market. This paper elaborates on the first steps within an interdisciplinary research project between materials science and industrial design engineering regarding ‘Design from Recycling’ (DfromR) that aims to design specifically with both post-consumer and post-industrial mixed recycled plastics that are industrially processed through extrusion or injection moulding. The goal of this research paper is to search for a practical and methodological support for designing with the recycled plastic waste streams, which can be applied to the upcoming cases in the Design from Recycling project. Due to similarities with this ongoing research, the existing Material Driven Design (MDD) method is chosen as a reference method. However, to address the expected challenges regarding the specific context of industrial processing techniques, we propose and present two additional steps: (i) an elaborated technical characterisation in the engineering lab, leading to a virgin-recycled comparison table concerning the main technical material properties that need to be translated to designerly descriptions, and (ii) an user-centred consumer evaluation of the experiential material characteristics of the provided shapeindependent samples, leading to experiential moodboards. To conclude, the paper presents the interpretation of the four steps in the MDD process in the context of the material cases of the ongoing Design from Recycling project.