Michelle Baggerman is a curious designer. She takes an intuitive and inquisitive approach and sees every project as a chance for exploration and so combines her design practice with design research. Playing with tech and tradition, her work is inspired by the values of past practices and old techniques as well as her taste for science and technology and a great concern for sustainable development. Her projects arise from unlikely intersections of old and new and provide approaches to a better future. At EHV Innovation Café she discussed her adventures in the Japanese silk industry and the value of craft practices for a sustainable future.

Imagine you take your phone, you drop it on the floor, the screen is broken, you need to replace it. How great would it be if the screen could repair itself? Ghislaine Vantomme is a chemist at TU Eindhoven, looking for strategies to bring materials to life. To achieve this, it is necessary to control the structure of the materials at the molecular level. The challenge there is to understand how molecules come together and interact into complex structures. The interactions between the molecules are reversible bonds: bonds that can form, break and reform, and it is the motion we try to translate to the material. This way, we can make plastics able to repair themselves or even move, as if they were alive.

This edition is made possible by Art + Tech Society.