From Fibre to Form – Exploring Design Qualities of Mechanically Recycled Textiles

This project investigates how mechanically recycled textiles can be transformed into meaningful design objects and examines the designer's role in shaping circular textile practices. The research seeks to understand how designers can engage with the colour variation, material irregularity and heterogeneous qualities that arise through mechanical recycling and thermally bonded nonwoven processes. It further examines how such engagement can reveal new possibilities for valuing and utilising discarded textiles. Central to the project is how designers can respond to the wicked problems of textile recycling and contribute to more materially sensitive forms of circularity.

The investigation is grounded in hands-on material and technological explorations conducted in both laboratory and industrial settings. Working directly with textile recycling methods, the project adopts a material-driven design approach to understand how sorting, mechanical shredding, fibre recomposition and thermal bonding influence material behaviour, appearance and expressive potential. This practice-based methodology enables the study to follow materials through recycling processes and to examine how design engagement can open new aesthetic and functional pathways.

One strand of the research focuses on mixed-colour textile waste and the challenge of creating coherent material expressions from ever-changing waste streams. Through colour grouping, systematic sampling and exploratory making, the project investigates how diverse colour blends can be applied as a resource for interior and product contexts, offering alternatives to established commercial expectations of perfection and absolute replicability.

A second strand explores possibilities for forming three-dimensional objects from waste-derived fibres using adapted moulding technologies. Rather than testing technological parameters, this part of the research examines how design experimentation can advance technological understanding and introduce new product pathways for complex waste textiles. It investigates how mechanically processed fibres behave when shaped and how their heterogeneous character can support distinctive spatial and formal expressions.

Together, these investigations highlight the complexity of textile recycling and show how design-led inquiry can broaden the perceived capabilities of recycling technologies. The research underscores that meaningful change requires collaborative efforts to critically address current production and consumption systems and their material impacts. The project demonstrates how designers can act as agents of change, reshaping perceptions and values, and integrating discarded textile resources into new, more sustainable material cycles.