Photo: Dried Seaweed
A group of Master’s students were selected to participate in this year’s Milan Design Week. It all started when Paolo Cacciato, a representative of the Milan Design Week, visited the Student EXPO in October 2021 and approached SACES to take part in this design exhibition. We spoke to Carla Cardona, the secretary general at SACES and she said “This event was a first for us, as well as for Malta. SACES wanted to give a group of students an opportunity to have their work displayed at this prestigious annual event.”
The chosen group of master's students were; Owen Degiorgio, Tara Zikic, Martina Chetcuti, and Luke Scicluna. The theme for this year's Super Design Show was titled 'Looking Ahead" and the goal was to showcase innovative, sustainable designs and products while giving a glimpse of how design will evolve.
The UM team proposed an organic and fully biodegradable material made of local seaweed waste and paper, done using roughly the same process used to make paper. A practical use for this would be shading on beaches. However, the material was exhibited as an interactive walkway, where one could walk through and feel the material. I will be attaching the booklet explaining the concept below.
David Debattista (SACES President), gave a talk about sustainability, especially relating to ALKA and Malta. This presentation was live-streamed by Super Design Show and can be found through this link.
This was quite a challenging task for all the SACES members, being responsible for all communications between the Super Studio Group, other logistics, and figuring out how to build a stable structure that could eventually be exported to Milan. The project required a very large sum of funds, and this project was made possible thanks to our main sponsors: MTA, The Ministry of Education, ASG Produzioni, and the Ministry of National Heritage, the Arts, and Local Government.