CircularHomeLab: reaching out to inspire

Project

268568

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Submitted

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS : existing completed examples

Project title

CircularHomeLab: reaching out to inspire

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Description

Circular Home Lab hosts virtual workshops that invite all sustainability enthusiasts to explore the circular materiality of transforming food waste into home products. Driven by the aim to inform and inspire more sustainable futures, we share stories about the current transitions from global to local production and citizen empowerment within the circular economy through DIY material making.

Where was your project implemented in the EU?

When was your project implemented?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Which programme(s) or fund(s)? Provide the name of the programme(s)/fund(s), the strand/action line as relevant and the year.

Please provide a summary of your project

Team Circular Home Lab is a duo with interdisciplinary backgrounds from business innovation and material research, hosting virtual workshops and inviting all sustainability enthusiasts to explore the circular materiality of transforming food waste into home products. Driven by the aim to inform and inspire more sustainable futures, we share stories about the current transitions from global to local production and actively engage in citizen empowerment within the circular economy through DIY material making. Our workshops offer a mix of theory and practise. Starting with new economic systems and research around leveraging food waste towards a valuable resource for innovation in biodesign, moving into transforming this new knowledge into tangible matter by turning household food waste into objects. Being virtual - Circular Home Lab workshops invite you to join from your most local place: your home.  What makes Circular Home Lab different and sparks the interest of participants, clients and collaborators world wide -  is the unique background to bring business innovation and biodesign together. This enables us to share the skills and mindsets required to understand our complex world better. In simple words, not only seeing ‘what sustainable research and innovations exist’ within science and arts but also ‘how we can start to implement these new thoughts and processes’ from personal and business perspectives. From local to global outlook.  

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability and how these have been met

SDG goals met by CHL: Sustainable Cities and Communities Responsible Production and Consumption Climate Action > These SDG goal are being met by looking into surplus as an opportunity to re-design and re-use existing materials rather than using virgin resources. Furthermore, we highlight the benefits of understanding and embracing local ecosystems, resulting into shorter, circular supply chains and collaborative production in communities. Empowering people locally on a global level.   Sustainability of operations: Only virtual services to avoid travel Main meetings via whereby - to off-set the carbon footprint of our virtual meetings with the Whereby tree-planting initiative The team promotes a sustainable lifestyle by eating mostly vegetarian and half the team being vegan.   Sustainability of our services: The recipes used in our workshops are vegan We promote organic ingredients No paper-handouts No team travel so far The main ingredient of our material making is accessible from home    Promoting sustainability through content: Share tools and skills to empower individual and communal sustainable actions on personal and professional level. We invite participants to rethink waste and it's systems with us. Together we explore the beauty of natural colours from food leftovers and potential applications in DIY material making. The Circular Home Lab workshops 'Design from Waste', is an introductory level series that aims to empower anyone to start creating sustainable biomaterials. Through communal exploration we aim for our workshops to be a space to come together and with a communal spirit explore the vast possibilities of designing with the most local resource we have - our household surplus.  Team Circular Home Lab has the vision that through exploring together, learning and applying new skill sets - we create the tools to feed and realise more sustainable futures for all - for Earth and its inhabitants.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met

At Circular Home Lab, we strive to create a virtual experience that brings people together across national borders and from around the globe. Our aim is to inspire and promote new thinking around waste, circular economy and DIY making. The experience we offer in our workshops takes participants through a journey of learning, providing new skill sets that can be applied within the workshop and continued and extended after the workshop.  With backgrounds in design and communication, we aim for a refined, welcoming look to our workshops and overall brand identity that makes the uptake of information as accessible as possible and our pre- and post-workshop handouts aim to guide participants on their future steps of exploration.  

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion and how these have been met

Global outreach through virtual service, with people joining from world wide, with 50+ cities + 4 continents so far. Global accessibility, through virtual offering and special (lower) community workshop prices. Community workshop prices differ to our more business orientated services. Equipment required to part-take is standard kitchen equipment, ingredients for material making at the very low price end. Encouraging use of regional and seasonal ingredients, allowing flexibility with food waste ingredients and explaining how to process these, e.g. jackfruits from Mexico, zapote from Columbia and potato from Germany. English as workshop language, in hope to reach as many people as possible. Special discounts upon request. Workshop for people of ages 16-no limit. No restrictions in gender, ethnicity. People can part-take with people assisting them. The Circular Home Lab basic workshop is an introductory level, allowing people to join without pre-knowledge of economics, business design, biodesign, material making.

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

With our Circular Home Lab workshops we take an Earth-centred perspective and reach out to people around the world to create an inclusive experience that promotes an optimistic and empowered approach to a more sustainable future. It is important to us to make this a positive, thought-provoking experience that translates into a personal and tangible experience. Circular Home Lab offers an educational, immersive workshop experience at an introductory level to invite a diverse audience, from communities to academia to businesses. Our community workshops alone have reached participants from 80+ global cities from London, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin to San Francisco, Montreal, Perth, Jakarta, Tokyo, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bogota and Mexico City. For academic workshops, we tailor our workshop service to higher education at MA level, partnering with the world leading University of the Arts, London and working with further universities across continents. Circular Home Lab also has a presence at conferences, reaching out to audiences in sustainability, design and economy. We have also hosted workshops for design professionals working in world-leading companies (fashion, electronics, retail, branding) to promote and inspire new approaches for design teams in influential global corporations.  

Please explain the way citizens benefiting from or affected by the project and civil society have been involved in the project and what has been the impact of this involvement on the project

With Circular Home Lab, we initiate discourse around the value of waste as a resource and the place of new products and materials in a circular economy. We invite participants to take alternative leaps into how the world could be through the lenses of art, business, design and science, exploring sustainable ecosystems for their environments, be it professional, personal or regional. Our workshops provide a space to come together and explore, with a collaborative spirit, the vast possibilities of designing with the most local resource we have - our household surplus.  Using this resource not only empowers our workshop participants to transform the accessible resource into sustainable materials and objects for their personal use. It also nurtures an awareness for local contexts in terms of food accessibility, environmental conditions and local economic systems. Furthermore, it enables a creative transformation of the newly acquired knowledge and skills from the workshop into individual actions for a sustainable future that have the potential to be multiplied and implemented in local and global contexts. 'I've been making (more experiments)with the recipe and knowledge I gained during your workshop in February. I'm very excited and still in the process of making more!' - Nicole, student 'It was so great and energising to experiment with the materials and (...) I really enjoyed the presentation before we started (the making) - how you communicate the movement sharing and promoting this approach also including other creatives. It’s the way forward!' - Sabina, professional designer and associate lecturer

Please highlight the innovative character of the project

The innovative character of Circular Home Lab lies within the unique combination of sharing insights into the systems complexity of economic realms and the translation of learnings and new thinking into tangible matter through DIY material making from local waste. The combination of theory and application nurishes a tangible, immediate, actionable mindset. This allows the workshop to be expanded into a range of more and less complex versions. From a 2h workshop to a 3-day bootcamp to a 4-week summer school programme. Expanding on actionable tasks for participants, deep dives into holistic material systems and business case design. By combining business thinking with material research practices, we inspire not only about the sustainable opportunities that are out there and how to create them, but also how to connect them with our current world models. Business(es) lack(s) real cutting edge innovation that not only improves our life as human beings but also check-in with planetary boundaries and needs. Our world is full of untapped knowledge and energy that lies outside of the central hubs of business power in our global markets. We believe it is the early stage scientific research paired with art, craft and design that will save us. Building upon Joi Ito's foresight that ‘Biodesign is the new digital', we see biodesign as the new and future solutions driven by harnessing the power of nature. However, we need to start working with the system we have today. That means to enable and empower craftspeople, artists and designers, with the tools needed to participate and compete within today’s economies - as well as making businesses and markets aware of the new opportunities that mostly lie out of their day to day worlds. 

Please explain how the project led to results or learnings which could be transferred to other interested parties

We started the first pilot in August 2020 with a group of volunteers, fellow material designers and innovation consultants. Since then, we have had participants from more than 60 cities and four continents joining our sustainable journey. This provides a richness to the workshop that enables all participants to learn from each other's backgrounds, regional and seasonal food, climate and infrastructural factors. This is often highlighted by participants and supports our focus on facilitating sessions for small groups to enable interaction and collaboration. Virtual is not a gap filler, it is a true enabler. Not only would our workshop costs for in-person workshops be much higher due to the need to offer equipment and materials for each participants (which they now acquire locally before our workshops, equipped by us with a pre-workshop handbook), we would not have been able to reach participants with such diverse cultural and professional backgrounds. We are hoping for support through the European Bauhaus to use the value of our outreach to expand our workshop to a 2-3 day challenge in the form of a bootcamp for academia. The bootcamp would build on our current introductory workshops and expand them to an advanced workshop where we not only explore our topics in more depth, but also encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations between universities to run the bootcamps with partner universities from other countries - something that only virtual learning can give us in this way. The most local we can be are our homes. As Circular Home Lab we encourage everyone to explore the circularity of (food) waste from their homes. Before Covid-19, a workshop felt like it most often needed to be in a fancy or well-equipped space. By participating from the home kitchen, the message is that the skills and tools we share can start making an impact no matter where you are. It is important to emphasise that these skills can be transferred from the kitchen to an industrial lev &am

Is an evaluation report or any relevant independent evaluation source available?

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the Awards more than once under the same category and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.