“My main input is sunlight, and I make my own raw material,” says Charlotte McCurdy
New York-based designer Charlotte McCurdy talks to Reframe about her work with algae, including bioplastic sequins she made for Phillip Lim and her 2019 debut at New York’s Cooper Hewitt – a carbon-negative raincoat also made from a plastic-like material that developed from the organism, which naturally sequesters carbon from the atmosphere.
McCurdy is a partner of One X One with the support of Swarovski, the UN Office for Partnerships and the Slow Factory Foundation. She holds a master’s in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she served as Global Security Fellow with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, and a bachelor’s in Global Affairs from Yale University.
BC: How was it working with a large fashion brand/person like Phillip Lim?
CM: Working with Phillip Lim and the 3.1 Phillip Lim team (special shout out to Alyssa Cohen) was a dream come true. We kicked off the project in January of 2020, so as you might imagine, the disruption of the pandemic was the greatest challenge we faced. I felt very lucky to be a small, independent design studio because it let me be very flexible. The autonomy of my practice also let me continue working when much else was on pause last summer. My main input is sunlight, and I make my own raw material by hand, so I was able to do that. I already had a bit of a dangerous tendency to want to do everything from scratch and not depend on supply chains, and I think this experience has only reinforced that inclination towards self-sufficiency.
McCurdy created green bioplastic sequins from algae for a collaboration with Phillip Lim
BC: What’s the one most promising technology or development you think the industry should adopt more broadly?
CM: Renewable power is now the cheapest source of new energy around the world. Battery storage is on track to be the cheapest way to meet peak demand in the next few years. Financial institutions and corporates around the world are putting new focus on climate risk because of the inevitable impact of climate change on their bottom lines. But voluntary actions are not enough. Voluntary standards protect the market share of entrenched players, slow change, and create barriers to entry for small innovators. I am excited by the rollout of bans around the world on the sale of new internal combustion passenger vehicles and the subsequent response by industry. This is a pattern that will be taken up by other industries. We can thrive in a carbon-free future; we need clear vision and communication. We need good design.
“If you cannot afford the ‘more sustainable’ version of a product or service, climate change is not your fault. ”
BC: The cost of something is most often on people’s minds before impact. What are some ideas to get more people on board with thinking about sustainability?
CM: If you cannot afford the “more sustainable” version of a product or service, climate change is not your fault. Consumer choice is not the answer to sustainability. But it is a powerful tool to drive investment, research, and development that changes what is desirable, affordable, and acceptable.
I introduced my carbon-negative work within the visual vocabulary of luxury goods because I am looking at the precedent of solar panels, smartphones, and electric vehicles. All of those technologies started as luxury goods and, through incremental breakthroughs and reaching economies of scale, these technologies became accessible and widespread. These technologies became affordable because they were supported for years and sometimes decades by a consumer base who believed in what they represented — who were attracted to their design.
The sequins are cut from bioplastic sheets, which are made by exposing algae to heat, encouraging it to bind together and then poured into a mould to harden
BC: Some people think sustainability isn’t the right word because it’s so vague and used for almost everything, but there are no easy alternatives. Do you relate? If so, what’s an appropriate substitute?
CM: “Sustainability” is not just vague it is the wrong metaphor. Sustain, sustenance, bearable, to undergo or suffer, to keep afloat. “Able to be upheld.” Is that really a vision worth working towards? “Sustainability” by definition is about maintaining the status quo. And not only is the status quo woefully inadequate in more ways than can be named here, but we have also already done too much damage to go forward and merely sustain. The majority of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios that keep us under 1.5 degrees centigrade in global average temperature increase rely on negative emissions technologies that we don’t even have yet. We need to be more ambitious than “sustainability.”
I have been relying on the language of “regeneration,” which while imperfect, makes clear that we need to create a new system — a fundamentally different system than the past status quo — that works better for more people, heals past wounds, and takes a systems-scale approach to designing a fundamentally renewable and mutually beneficial system.
“Once sustainable design has centered climate change, we need decarbonization over offsets.”
BC: What’s the one major thing you think has to happen right now to further efforts in sustainable design?
CM: Design needs to take the crisis of climate change seriously and literally. “Sustainable design” has many vectors of concern such as water use, waste, and biodiversity, and while these challenges are important, they are also not coming at us as fast and hard as climate change in terms of systematic negative impact.
We need an unprecedented transformation in our emissions in the next few years if we even want to have the societal foundation to continue work on those other domains of concern.
Once “sustainable design” has centered climate change, we need decarbonization over offsets. Designers increasingly have the opportunity to make their own operations carbon-free and can advise their clients and partners on strategies and paths that are carbon-free. We are in the midst of a carbon offset boom that risks obscuring and delaying actual carbon reductions in favor of easy optics that don’t actually change practices.
BC: How would you describe your work to your grandma?
CM: One of my grandmothers was a trailblazing mathematician and the other was a master seamstress who composted before it was cool, so my work on impacting global carbon flows through carbon-negative textiles, I think they would both get.
But in the spirit of your question: I would tell them that I craft designed objects that outline invisible systems and potential futures in order to make the challenge and mandate of climate change more tangible. I would tell them I was working in my own small way to help catalyze a culture shift like the many they witness and participated in their lifetimes.
