Often, the items consumers deem most luxurious in the world are those of scarcity. But what’s difficult for one person to source may be bountiful for another—especially when it comes to waste materials, which are frequently an expensive nuisance in poor countries. To address this disconnect, a team of designers at Space10, a research and design lab backed by IKEA, recently published a map that uses artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT to pinpoint abundant sources of waste materials around the globe.
Once the materials report was generated, the designers of the project, dubbed Products of Place, then directed the AI tool to dream up dishware to make the most of the stocks. “Every culture developed their own kind of plates, and they initially emerged from a set of constraints and materials availability, which is the whole focus of the project,” Matteo Loglio, founder and design director of Oio, one of two involved design firms, tells AD PRO. “But we kind of lost [that regional ingenuity] with globalization…So, we were like, how can we bring it back?”
Produced with a materials palette ranging from shredded paper and coconut husks to less obvious materials like discarded crayons, tennis balls, and salmon bones, the resulting speculative dish designs are thought-provoking originals—some ultracool, others straight-up strange.
“In order to decide which concepts would be viable, you would need to have some understanding of the local materials, which ones could actually be safe for use or be potentially viable material choices,” says Alexandra Zenner, who does creative & planning work for Space10. She adds that ChatGPT “challenged our preconceived ideas of what a viable material was” by churning out many material suggestions that aren’t found in nature, meaning the substances would “need to go through immense testing.”
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Because Oio and Space10 used ChatGPT and not a custom-trained AI system, the team had no influence on the information or images fed into the algorithm conjuring up the playful plates. While that might prevent their own biases from creeping into the speculative concept, it also means that they couldn’t control for the bias inherent to the internet. Plus, the team decided not to serve viewers with an edited version of the designs, instead providing the AI-generated dishware and accompanying information without the guidance of a curatorial eye. Cue the AI disclosure: that means some materials may be completely overlooked, some designs may be stereotypical, and some information may be false.
What began as a sustainably minded initiative for the IKEA-backed innovation hub led to a deeper assessment of AI in design. Loglio’s takeaway? “The important thing is to be aware of [those risks] and to not pretend that these products will give us something ‘true’ or something that we should look at as a desirable next step for design in general.”
