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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...

Back in June 2022, I wrote a blog post about the touring exhibition Plastic: Remaking our world. At the time the exhibition was on display at Vitra Design Museum. I was lucky enough to meet with one of the curators, Charlotte Hale, and visit the exhibition when it was on display at V&A Dundee...

One of the cases in our current exhibition, Reuse , looks at the problems that black plastics have when it comes to the recycling system and therefore how the material is then reused. When products and packaging made of plastics enter the recycling system, they need to be separated into individual...

The collection of household plastics for recycling through the UK’s Local Authority bin collection service began exactly twenty years ago with the introduction of the 2003 Household Waste Recycling Act. Looking back, it now seems crazy that up until that point, we had all been throwing our plastics...

In the late 1950s, furniture manufacturer Hille approached Robin Day with the idea of producing a one-piece chair shell to add to their range. Up to that point, there were a limited number of materials that could achieve such a design, such as pressed metal, structural ply or glass-reinforced...

Since the introduction of the first disposable hot drinks cups by American company DART in the mid 20th century, the consumer has become used to the concept of single-use. Dart Manufacturing Company was established in 1937 in Mason, Michigan, USA making plastic key cases, steel tape measures and ID...

As a museum curator of a small museum, I find that my work each week can be varied and extremely interesting. This last week has been full of working out budgets for the coming year, thinking about new acquisitions, updating object records, and thinking about our next exhibition. I have also been...