Upcycling Discarded HDPE Plastic Bags, 2019-2021

Himani Deshpande, Jin Yu, Akash Talyan, Noah Posner, Clement Zheng, HyunJoo Oh

Upcycling Discarded HDPE Plastic Bags for Creative Exploration in Product Design, DRS 2022: DOI PDF

Upcycling enables new product production out of clean materials through creative reuse of discarded materials. This paper presents a new structured process to support designers to use discarded HDPE plastic bags as useful and meaningful materials for creative exploration. The proposed process involves a four-step fabrication workflow using tools and machines widely available in design studios: (1) preparing a stack of plastic sheets, (2) fusing the stack of materials to create a new plastic sheet with intended thickness, (3) cutting and scoring the fused sheet to create parts, and (4) assembling the parts to build 3D artifacts. To assist the fabrication, we also present a custom design software as an add-on to an existing CAD environment and describe how we developed the fabrication-aware design features through a workshop with seven students. We demonstrate the feasibility and creative potential of the design and fabrication process by four application examples and expert reviews with three product designers.