the brief as it stands

My project brief is to use Transit Design's waste material generated from earlier collections of the brand 'Padmaja' and create meaningful, quirky and unique textures that surprise the viewer. I approached the project through an understanding of what the term 'waste' means in a contemporary context and understanding and critiquing the notion of Zero-Waste. Is it affordable as a concept in our society? Can we ever adapt to the changes and demands that it will place on our lifestyles and comforts? Having to design for the avant garde customer required me as a designer to understand the history of fashion especially the avant garde movement and what it threw up to the foreground. How could I decades later use the ideas underlined by the movement to my advantage? I was essentially bringing together the contemporary concern of waste in society as well as the avant garde, innovative design sensibility together to create a project that would not only question the role of waste but to secure the waste generated in the production process a position of value at Transit Design's studio.

This meant having to understand what zero waste signifies to modern day society and contemporary practices, especially in India. The more research I did, I began to realize that a lot of what this philosophy vaguely outlines already exists in various forms in our country. The most common being the kaantha embroidery technique where women from West Bengal collect scraps of old clothes, bed sheets, towels and layer them to create the most simple embroidery patterns on. What does zero waste aim to achieve? What would it mean to the world of consumerism? Does zero-waste underline the need for a simple lifestyle, simple choices and sustainable living? Does it assign the responsibility of waste to the designer or the customer? As a concept, how does it treat 'waste'?

Ever since the project started I began to read about this concept of zero waste immensely. I read articles, blogs and speeches given by imminent environmentalists and philosophers on views, suggestions and critiques. I chanced upon many blogs that featured people who took stock of their waste for 365 of the year in efforts to recognize their carbon footprint. I found artists who used waste to create art, to make statements on lifestyles and some who generally stirred things up with their views on waste. Were they reusing and recycling or was it an unseen effort in the direction of creating zero-waste?


As opposed to the concept of recycling, zero waste is a philosophy that aims to redesign resource life cycles so that all products are reused. It is a process that aims to generate zero waste; to create a product or a service that is used by the consumer and returned to the company to be cleaned, filled and used again. This cyclic process eliminates the creation of waste, as opposed to the present system in which products and services are designed in such a way that they ultimately create waste. Recycling marginally helps in locating potential resources that are considered waste by the consumer and to reuse them to stretch the lifetime of that resource. What is important and interesting is not which process is more efficient or feasible given the constraints of energy, production costs, and design sensibilities, but rather the difference in the approach to the idea of 'waste'. And in turn not only how 'waste' is treated but how much responsibility it puts on the consumer to ensure a better future in the long run. 

Where I feel the system is flawed is with our understanding of the term 'waste'. What meanings do we associate with the term 'waste'? Is it really waste if it has potential to be used in other ways? In a philosophical context, whatever we create always ends up as waste. As Susan Strasser wrote in her book, " ...what counts as trash depends on who's counting."

Taking the concept for the project from here, I decided to work with waste and say that it can be used to create avant garde, one-off pieces for the high end client if it were just not treated as "waste". Why have we attached negative connotations to the idea of waste.

"When you are trapped in on paradigm, the next paradigm seems like science fiction."

paraphrasing from the writings of Thomas Kahn | John Markoff