A Sense of Ownership,
2019

Within the current product design landscape, the importance of sustainability is becoming something that can not be ignored. However, I feel like a fair amount of products are being designed to be disposed of in a green way, rather than being designed to not be thrown away in the first place. By turning around the approach of sustainable design, we can start looking at what role designers can play in lengthening the product cycle.

For this project, I focused on the concept of psychological ownership: the mental state in which individuals feel that an object is theirs. Through my research into the principles of the concept, I constructed a frame of reference from which I initiated a material research into the technique of hand weaving. This resulted in a series of woven structures based on different "routes" towards psychological ownership, amongst which creating a feeling of having control, and stimulating a feeling of intimate knowledge between observer and the woven structure. The project is meant to be seen as my interpretation of the concept, with the goal of starting a thought process about the approach of sustainability in an emotional manner.