2023

At the end of June, I attended a fascinating conference held at the University of Portsmouth. PlasticsFuture 2023 was convened over three days and brought together speakers from across the world to present their research around, and experiences of, plastics pollution. The team behind the conference...

Once again flicking through the trade journals in our collection and recognising an object that we own has enriched our record with a wealth of information. This time I was looking through an edition of British Plastics from February 1955 and I stumbled across a fabulous article about the...

Decarbonisation is a theme in our current exhibition, Reuse . Carbon footprints are a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released over the full life cycle of a product. They are notoriously difficult to assess because there are many factors that need to be considered...

At the end of last year, an MA Architecture student, Jemma Chapman came in to the museum to explore the use of waste plastics. We talked about a variety of concepts and objects including Greenbrick's building blocks. Large blue brick, Greenbrick, AIBDC : 008795.3 Since meeting with Jemma, she has...

Earlier in the year I had the most fabulous ‘school trip’ to Dundee to visit the Plastic: remaking our world exhibition at V&A Dundee. To get the most out of the journey I had a look at some other museums that I could visit on the way. The best fit was another university collection focusing on a...

The concept of Design for Disassembly was first introduced in the early 1990s. It advocates for the environment by recommending products be designed in such a way that they can be easily taken apart at the end of their useful life, with parts then either reused or recycled. In practice this could...

On a recent trip to the Museum of Design in Plastics, I was reminded of my first visit to LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark. I have been lucky enough to work with LEGO over the past eight years, producing games for their new LEGO sets. My first project was updating the mobile game LEGO City for...

The Merle Norman cosmetics box bag features in the current MoDiP Reuse exhibition as part of the Another Life case, which looks at other uses for packaging in which some products are offered for sale. AIBDC : 009526 Image credit: MoDiP The Merle Norman brand of cosmetics is not familiar in the UK...

Architecture and industrial design are two separate fields of study, but they do share similarities. In essence, both architects and industrial designers are problem solvers and focus on the way people live, but through the lens of different scales and perspectives. Many trained and/or practising...

In 1995 Dyson launched the Recyclone, the first vacuum cleaner to be made entirely of recycled plastics (refer image below). The DC02 Recyclone Image credit: https://www.dyson.co.uk/james-dyson/invention-a-life/07 Initially the cleaners were made from waste materials of the DC01 and DC02...