New Wave Partition
A textile partition wall that celebrates scraps.
2022 | 10 Weeks
Product Design | Regenerative Design | Tools: Illustrator, Sewing
Student Project for Master’s Degree in Industrial Design
DESIGN QUESTION
How might we reuse discarded textiles to divert them from landfills?
SOLUTION
Inspired by scrap quilting, the New Wave partition is made with pre-consumer textile remainders, rejects, and off-cuts, the New Wave Partition delineates space and provides acoustic dampening.
It can hang on a stand, a rod, or from the ceiling. Multiple panels can be joined to create a larger division.
8’x4’ wall panel mockup
Detail of a 1’x1’ square
PROCESS
I began thinking about how small scraps of textiles could be used as modular components to make something larger. Inspired by scale armor, I began creating small ‘scales’ in muslin and considered how they could be layered to create a continuous surface.
This project focused on pre-consumer textile waste or production waste, which includes “scraps, damaged or defective material samples, fabric selvages and leftover fabric from the cutting process. On an average, about 15 percent of fabric used in garment production is cut, discarded and wasted.” Cotton is a particularly expensive material to manufacture and especially unfortunate to waste. I added color to create continuity between the scraps.
I estimated the impact of each strategy to assess their viability. Making squares and sewing them into overlapping grids used 59% of fabric scraps. Stuffing the off-cuts of the squares into the squares themselves and then sewing them into an overlapping grid used 100% of the original source material (muslin scraps). The density and thickness of this result suggested potential acoustic qualities the resulting 3D ‘quilt’ would have, and I determined to make a partition.
PIVOT
While the concept was working from a regenerative standpoint, midway through the project I got the feedback that the form of the partition had lost the sense of ‘scrappiness’ the source material had. This inspired me to pivot, moving away from a clean scale armor look to a rough, organic style that would not hide the reclaimed nature of the piece.
Inspired by scrap quilting, I sewed the scraps in undulating lines across 1’x1’ squares of a sturdier cotton, and then joined those squares to create a larger panel.
I created four designs and generated a mockup of a full scale, 8’x4’ partition by duplicating and rotating them. The final concept used 97% or 23 lbs of the source scrap material, reclaiming nearly twice as much as the previous concept, preserving more cotton and providing better acoustic dampening.
REFLECTION
This regenerative strategy was highly effective, and feel it would have potential beyond a partition, which serves merely as a proof of concept.
I imagine encouraging businesses with their own off-cut streams to reimagine this waste as an opportunity for new product lines. There is particular potential for the off-cuts of proprietary fabrics, which for intellectual property reasons must be destroyed or shredded (they cannot be resold or reclaimed outside the company). There is some precedent for this, as in the case of fashion brand Greg Lauren partnering with quilting experts Gee’s Bend to create their Mosaic collection.
