experimental materials & design collective
alt.material is a platform for encouraging the exchange and sharing of knowledge and ideas
  • Designer News

    Introducing designer Amber Lucy of Thread Architecture. Working with marine grade rope her sculptures are produced "through exploratory methods whilst contemplating the complexities of creative thought."

    Her work explores the intersection of conscious and unconscious creative processes, with each influencing the other in a fluid and dynamic manner. Her latest creation, available exclusively for alt.material is a sculptural mobius LED lamp.

  • Wonderful Waste!

    Our friends at Never Too Small have recently released their video series titled 'Wonderful Waste'. Each episode features key designers and inventors finding utility in forgotten furniture, binned plastics, construction waste, and discarded appliances.

  • Sand cast aluminium

    Made from available studio samples and production components the studio chair by Tom Fereday for our ingenuity exhibition (which took place during the Covid lockdown) creates a chair that celebrates the raw uncompromising finish of production prototypes. 

    Celebrating the defects and marks of sand cast aluminium the studio chair was created from a necessity to create a piece entirely from available materials and samples within Tom's studio. Juxtaposing raw cast aluminium with reclaimed natural tan hide leather, the studio chair is an elegantly unrefined piece.

  • Plastic here to stay

    We’re not going to lose plastic from our lives, because it’s very useful. It reduces food waste, it reduces waste of almost everything, and it’s very lightweight and tough for transporting goods across the planet and all of that helps reduce CO2 emissions. In our clothes, now, the average piece of clothing is 67 per cent plastic. Our shoes are mostly plastic.

    Lots of stuff in our lives is all coated with plastic. It’s all vital, but we don’t have any systems for recycling those yet and I think we really, seriously fast need to redesign everything, so that there are systems for recycling everything in our lives.

    Pictured above is the Lambda Chair by Adam Goodrum & Patryk Koca -named after its font like form of the Greek letter and the connotation to calculated growth. Made for our very first exhibition 'plasticity' . It's made from recycled ABS in response to surplus plastic waste which can be challenging to use effectively in industrial processes. With the help of UTS Advanced Fabrication Workshop & Protospace utilisiing recycled waste plastic in a large scale robotic 3d printing process.

  • REVIVAL! Waste App

    Over consumption of scarce resources is driving designers to reclaim materials from waste. As well as offering environmental benefits, these innovations signal a shift in our relationship with materials, away from a linear take-make-discard model to a more cyclical approach where designers harvest alternative raw goods from industrial and domestic waste streams and landfill.

    Building Company & Co-operative Revival Projects has created an app that allows users to share their waste with othersto faciliate re-use & avoid landfill. "The purpose of the Revival Cooperative app is to facilitate large scale collective review of this “waste” to see if anyone has a use for it, before a conclusion is reached that  landfill is the best outcome. Entirely free to use and free to download, upload your ‘waste’ and invite the possibility of re-use before sending it to landfill."

  • Recycled denim

    We stumbled upon a carpet underlay made from recycled denim that we re-appropriated into an acoustic lining for one of our residential projects as an acoustic door & lining. So good infact that our studio used it to create a temporary pavilion for our friends TODAY at the Purpose Conference at Sydney Carriageworks.

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