MAXIMILLIAN MEDHURST
Portfolio of Work
Royal College of Art and Imperial College London
Solo Final Project: OpenMould (2021)
Globally less than 16% of plastics are recycled, the rest being burnt or sent to landfill. In my final solo project I worked with a community of localised plastic recyclers who are trying to challenge this with a new decentralised model for recycling. These recyclers collect plastic waste from their community and turn it directly into new products using open-source shredding and injection moulding machines - but I discovered that they were being held back by current mould making techniques. In response to this, I created OpenMould - an affordable and accessible mould making system...
Group Final Project: The Waterless Washing Company (2020)
In our final group project, we wanted to tackle the sustainability crisis faced by the fashion industry, and uniquely decided to do this by challenging the use-phase of clothing by designing a new way to wash clothes. Whilst it might be synonymous with washing, using water to wash clothes is extremely damaging for both clothes and the environment. So we designed a new washing process that actively eradicates smells and bacteria without using any water or liquids of any kind...
Solo Major Project: Street Safety for Teenagers (2020)
Hundreds of children are mugged every day in the UK, so in this project I looked at how outcomes of these muggings could be improved and injuries reduced. After a lot of research and exploration of different concepts I decided on a communication design approach, attempting to make teenagers better prepared by pre-considering what they would do in a mugging. I created a short animated video, targeted at parents, designed to trigger a conversation with their child about what they would do in a mugging situation...
Superform: The Saddle Chair (2020)
In this project, we were given four weeks to design and build an innovative new chair, thinking about the furniture user interface or FUI. I decided to try and re-think the way we interact with chairs by changing the way we sit on them. Drawing inspiration from the idea of sitting directly on the floor, particularly thinking about Asian cultures where people regularly sit directly on the floor rather than use a chair, I created the concept of the saddle chair...
XY Speculative Design: Margae (2020)
For a project looking at solar futures, my team created a concept for a bio-photovoltaic system to one day power a settlement on Mars. The proposed system used Cyanobacteria Algae as part of a biological solar panel, which could be flown to Mars as a small cluster of cells and then grown into a giant colony upon arrival...