Experimentation Week!

This week I set up a few experiments with plastic. The first experiment I proceeded to test is how comfortable plastic pieces can be – whether they could be an alternative for products like beanbags. For that I created a miniature version of such a beanbag with a felt cover and tiny cut up plastic pieces.

This experiment was certainly insightful, since the plastic pieces were not as uncomfortable as I would have thought they would be. However, I feel like this idea does not have the design potential that I would like my honours project to have.

The second exploration was trying to look into the diversity of the material. Plastic is typically seen as a bulky material due to the common association with packaging. However, is there a way to make plastic look delicate? I used plastic grocery bags, cut them into thin pieces and attached them together to form one long “string” out of plastic. This was then used to knit a round circle as seen in the image below.

I was amazed to see how fine plastic could look. It is very surprising to see how diverse this material is!

The next experiment was to see how plastic reacts to being heated. For this experiment I used the two different types of plastics that are commonly used for recycling: PET and HDPE. PET has the resin identification code number 1 and is typically found in plastic water bottles. HDPE is labelled number two on the identification code and is typically found in plastic bottle caps or shampoo bottles.

For this experiment I heated the oven at 180 ℃, placing the plastic on a baking tray that was lined with baking paper. Additionally, I added heavy weighted baking dishes to add pressure to create a flat piece of plastic.

At first, I used the body of the plastic water bottle (PET). As seen below in the picture, the individual pieces shrivelled up but did not melt together. This was a clear indicator, that PET on its own was not an option since you could not make a solid sheet of plastic out of it.

HDPE on the other had behaved completely different. The individual pieces fused nicely together and created on flat sheet of plastic that was relatively sturdy.

Once I realised that there were certain plastics that properly melted, and others did not, I wondered if you could merge two different types of plastic? For that I used fuse beads that are made of HDPE and a sheet of acrylic. I wanted to see if I can add dots of colour onto a clear surface and melt them together to create a smooth surface.

However, while the image might not show it well, the merging of different types of plastic does not work, or at least not within the safe environment that I can create at home.

Lastly, I wanted to see how bendable plastic was and how easy it was to form shapes out of plastic. For that I used acrylic sheets. Firstly, I wanted to see how acrylic behaves when exposed to the heat. Therefore, I placed a sheet of acrylics on top of a bowl and put that in the oven at 180 ℃. I really liked the outcome. While it did not evenly fold over the bowl, it did create a bowl shape that looks quite unique.

After that I wanted to explore what other shapes I could create when I actually bent the plastic myself. For that I used a smaller sheet of plastic and heated individual sections with an iron. The outcome was not quite as interesting looking as the previous experiment. I tried creating a wave, but it did not really work. I think I did not add enough heat to the plastic and especially once I started bending the plastic it was difficult to properly heat everything up with the iron.

Concluding, it was very beneficial to not simply sticking to theoretical knowledge, but rather physically exploring the material. Now I am a lot more aware of what I can and cannot do for the actual product and can start thinking about what my physical product will look like.