In the Details is our weekly look at one especially smart, innovative or unusual detail of a new design.
Daniel McLaughlin’s final project for London’s Royal College of Art, where he graduated with a master’s in innovation design engineering last spring, is a tribute both to his home country of New Zealand and to the good old-fashioned process of trial and error. McLaughlin embarked on the project without any real idea of what kind of product he was trying to make; his one starting point was that he wanted to find a way to utilize waste produced by New Zealand’s wool industry, one of the cornerstones of the country’s economy.
But what kind of product could he make out of wool waste? McLaughlin tried dunking the material in oil (to observe its natural hydroscopy); lighting it on fire (to watch it self-extinguish); and mixing it with wood glue and polyurethane resins to create rigid felt panels. The latter experiments were promising—what if, McLaughlin wondered, he could make the wool not just rigid but structural?—but they were obviously not environmentally friendly.
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