The Boisbuchet summer workshops are held in Lessac, France every year. Organised in cooperation with the Vitra Design Museum and The Centre Pompidou. They are an invitation for designers and makers to work with a group of people from all over the world in a unique and beautiful location. This year I decided to work with unique materials for a workshop titled PLASTIC.

I was generously sponsored by POLYMORPH who provided me with a large quantity of their low temperature thermoplastic. Although there are many types of these plastics on the market, I was attracted to its specific temperature range which can be reached just with boiling water. This means that it is an ultra portable material to use in both domestic situations and outdoors, as just a kettle, a cup of hot water from a cafe or a camp fire will provide heat to allow the material to melt. It is also biodegradable and food safe.

The title of the workshop is a word play, as plastics are normally something that we receive from industry as unchangeable and preformed, but here we worked directly with it as though it was plasticene with the final cooled strength of nylon. I wanted to think about plastic as a mental process rather than a received form.

The team made some amazing small scale experiments first and then moved onto larger things using the Polymorph combined with other materials. We learned many things during this week about possible applications for this incredible material.

Thank you to everyone who took part: Jian, Marek, Maria, Junpei, Felix, Ingrid, Cemal, Sonia, Sergio and Tim; also to the various guys in the workshop who dipped in to experiment. I had a great time working with all of you.

Thank you to Boisbuchet for the amazing venue, and to Carlo Cialli for some amazing photographs. Photographs included here are also taken by me and Cemal Okten who took part in the workshop. (I apologise that these photos are so jumbled up - there were too many interesting things going on!)

Most of all thank you to Polymorph for their ongoing help with these workshops. It’s great stuff, and I think you should buy some here.

because the polymorph can be reheated and reused, they just added on bits as they went