Claire Potter Design

The Smack Quite often we work with materials that other people see as a waste material. We love transforming ‘waste’ into something that is not only responsible, but well designed – telling a story as well as being desirable. Because you can be as worthy as you like with a design, but people need to love it too. The Smack started out as 365 sports drinks bottles recovered by the studio and volunteers from the beach after a running event in Brighton. We wanted to show how the bottles – which due to their design are currently unrecyclable in the UK – are an unresponsible design. To do this, we took the bottles through 7 processes to create 35 fully recyclable plastic jellyfish, lit by LED bulbs. Looking fragile, yet almost indestructible, they tell an important story of our relationship with plastic and the issues we have particularly when the material gets into our oceans. The Smack (the collective term for jellyfish) has been shown all over the UK at design shows and exhibitions and was selected by Kevin McCloud as one of his 10 Green Hero Products in 2017/18.

Battersea Power Station seating The construction industry is the UK’s biggest user of natural resources, despite continuing efforts to recover and redirect waste from building activities to other streams of use. Mostly, materials are directed off site for recycling, but what if we could create site specific items, on site, from site waste? This project was a collaboration between Battersea Power Station, Mace Construction and Par-Avion for London Craft Week 2019. All benches and seating were created using waste material from the Battersea Power Station project, including steel re-bar, plywood, aggregates and plastic strapping. Waste materials do not have to look second-rate – they can be used to create highly finished products. All materials are precious and we should make sure we recognise that with how they are used.

Brighton & Hove Food Partnership Community Kitchen Brighton & Hove Food Partnership has been using food as a focus for positive change in people’s lives for over 15 years, championing healthy eating, plot to plate growing, tackling food waste and connecting people through eating. As a non-profit organisation, the BHFP works with a variety of partners to deliver these projects, so wanted to create their own kitchen that could be used for events, teaching and programmes. As lead designers and interior architects, we took the space, a collection of dated offices and transformed it into a modern, open space which is bright, welcoming and flexible. *Winner of the RICS Awards South East, Community Benefit Category 2019*