Through our research over the summer learning how to make bioplastics from agar agar, we made many material samples. We tried many recipes, fine-tuning the ratios of water, glycerin, and agar agar. We also experimented with putting other additives in our base bioplastic recipe to see what kind of new properties the material would take on.

Here in the video, you can take a glimpse of our process.

To display our work and inform the viewers, we created a “tactile library” of our explorations.

The first board shows samples of the plain agar agar recipe. The amount of vegetable glycerin in the mixture affects the rigidity of the final plastic. We’ve included the recipes and other notes from our experimentation in the library.

On another board we’ve pinned other agar agar samples we created with different additives. Again, we’ve included the ingredients used to create each swatch highlighting how similar the plastics are component-wise, but how different they become once they’re cooked and dried.

In the center of the board we’ve included sticky notes we collected at our ideation session at ITP. The sticky notes have different ideas on what people could do or make with these materials.

We invite the viewer to look and touch our samples because they all have very distinct properties and also to imagine different futures for these uncommon materials.