About

** Looking for volunteer(s) to help add entries and improve existing ones. Please contact team@naturalfactory.org 🙂 **

NaturalFactory.org aims to inspire design and innovation that works with natural materials and processes, by collecting contemporary and historical examples. It’s a volunteer built project and we welcome your input through comments and suggestions for new entries.

Designers, makers, architects, engineers, and everyone else involved in creating the things we need;  are there ways we can better harness the energy efficient, climate friendly and zero-waste production and circularity offered by natural processes and organisms to create significantly more sustainable solutions? Can we innovate contemporary ways of using natural materials or, even better, ‘growing’ parts or entire products?

As we seek a sustainable, resilient, circular economy, let’s not forget that we already have one; nature.

Entries so far include drone fuselages grown from mushroom mycelium, bacterially produced biodegradable plastics and boutique furniture grown in a carbon-negative and biodiverse ‘orchard’, as well as more familiar natural materials and traditional craft processes which could perhaps be re-purposed or developed.

We are tentatively including entries from the rapidly developing field of biotech, which some believe holds the potential to provide sustainable solutions by interfacing with or carefully modifying living things.

This is a voluntary project started by designer/maker/biologist friends from from several countries interested in exploring this field together. We hope that you will join us by suggesting new entries, and help us improve existing ones by contributing information in the comments.

Samples Libraries

So far we have built one samples library of ‘Natural Factory’ materials and processes, at the wonderful MakerBay Hong Kong, who interned two of the team to build the library and link the items to entries on this site via QR codes.

Research Projects

We have also started some projects to investigate ‘Natural Factory’ materials and processes further:

Mycelium Research Project: Students at Poly U, Hong Kong, formed a team to investigate the properties and potential design uses of fungal mycelium.

BioAir: A residency project at Tsinghua University iCenter, Beijing.

Feedback

Please post suggestions for new entries (materials, processes, projects or ideas that you’d like to share) at Suggest.

If anything on this site is incorrect, offensive or infringing, please let us know in a comment on the entry, or…

To contact us directly (apologies if our response isn’t fast): team@naturalfactory.org

Thank you

To contributors, sources that entries on this site have drawn on, and supporting organisations:

MakerBay Hong Kong – Interning two of the team to work on the site and build a physical library of natural materials/processes.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Materials Research Centre (MRC) for providing samples of natural materials and access to their collection to help with researching entries.

Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab (SZOIL) for providing a space for two of us to work for a few days as we started our research tour in China, and suggesting ideas for entries.

Tsinghua University iCenter, Beijing, for offering a short residency to support the development of a ‘natural factory’ inspired research project, BioAir.

P.S.

We know that the term ‘natural’ is a semantic minefield. As a product of nature ourselves, everything we do could be considered natural – even unsustainably exploiting our environment. For this project please accept use of the term in its prevailing sense…

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better – Albert Einstein

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order – John Burroughs

There is no better designer than nature – Alexander McQueen

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished – Lao Tzu