The current environmental crisis has proven to be a total one, affecting biodiversity, soil, water and air. As a reaction to it, an ever-growing quest for sustainable alternatives to oil-based materials has emerged. In the field of design - products, interiors and fashion - this translated with increasing natural and bio-fabricated options developed at an industrial level as well as at an experimental design-studio level. Among other solutions, many companies, material engineers and designers started looking into the use of industrial agriculture leftovers motivated by the necessity of not stealing land from food production. Based strongly on local bioregional economies, these researches are creating an expanding landscape of natural materials. Despite giving birth to a richer biodiversity of resources, however, these researches are only technical solutions to the use of waste materials and are not questioning the agricultural system that generated them in the first place. They are not providing real alternatives to the environmental impact of monocultural industrial farming and, in some ways, they are even contributing to confusing people regarding the difference between renewable and extractive resources.

In response to this, the research project Syntropic Materials looks at alternative agroecological models such as regenerative agriculture practices and attempts to combine these with the latest development in natural material research. In order to design regenerative processes for plant/animal based materials production. Asking if this great innovation in the field of materials can open new possibilities for the development of polycultures, and vice versa, if the choices taken in designing polycultures could define new directions in new materials development. Until now the research took the shape of a database, the analysis of an existing polycultural regenerative agroecosystem, and a series of workshops.

What is presented on this website space is the state of development of the research and its first findings. It has the objective of shifting the focus on material research from use to origin, looking at the ecosystems from which raw materials come from. Presenting the approach proposed by Syntropic Materials research and questioning what could be the relationship between a polycultural biodiverse successional and cyclical agroecosystem and innovation in material production.

POLYCULTURES

For the development of the research a series of polycultural regenerative agroecosystems will be analysed and presented in the section Polycultures.

LIBRARY

Conceived as an open platform, the tool is an archive of materials catalogised through species and their material characteristics. The library allows us to browse through this information under the logic of species coexistence. When approaching the library users will be asked to select a hardiness zone, which is a geographic area defined to encompass a certain range of climatic conditions relevant to plant growth and survival This will lead users to be exposed to a list of potential materials producible with species growing in the same climatic conditions. From this point users will be able to filter their way through the information by de-selecting materials or species which are not of interest to them. The library can, for example, help users to enlarge the spectrum of species taken into consideration while designing a polycultural field for material production or foster the creation of new briefs for material design based on the combinations of plants that create regenerative ecosystems. Rather than being a simple repository of data, the platform functions as a filter and re-directory to information already published on and offline. Its primary objective is to centralise this information allowing us to create novel and meaningful connections. What is presented now is the first iteration of the library. With the development of the research, further information and filtering tools are planned to be added.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am an Italian designer, educated in hegemonic European schools of Art and Design. That being said, I am sensitive to the responsibilities and forms of power tied to my positionality as a White European designer with significant institutional support. The ideas herein are polyphonic, reflecting the sustained reading and conversations I have had with post-colonial and indigenous scholars, activists, thinkers and writers. They are not the exclusive preserve of my own authoritative voice but the outcome of heterogeneous influences.

In privileging indigenous knowledge, I situate indigeneity not as radical alterity but as a form of world building at odds with our contemporary extractivist moment, in which ecological crisis can only be confronted through pluralistic, open and dynamic traditions.

This openness and the presumed parity between different ontological and epistemological systems is what allows me to experiment with the promises (and failures) of Western science and indigenous relationships to land and environment. This is part of an effort to think ourselves out of the quagmire that environmental crisis portends.