Monica Bhatia : Design for a Living World

In the Chicle and the Cocoa projects the designers took indigenous materials and designed with them in their own style.  They also made a point of processing the material traditionally, as to give natives the ability to keep on producing and selling the product with the aid of the designer’s additions.

Cocoa by Yves Behar

I like the cocoa project because it identifies a group of people that are not often thought about, the Bribri Indians of Talamanca.  Behar put in thought and research in finding a crop and a production process and designed a tool to be used to assist in the consumption of it.  I like that he did not try to change the appearance of the actual cocoa patty because then he would change the manufacturing process.  Instead, he designed around it in such a way that the tool could bring awareness to these people and what they do.

Chicle Latex by Hella Jongerious

In Hella’s project, however, she used chicle in a way in which it had not been before.  Traditionally used as an ingredient of chewing gum, Hella used this moldable material to repair her ceramics.  Although I do find her solution interesting, unlike Yves, her end result was not a mass producible product. The chicleros of Yucatán extract chicle from the chicozapote tree every several years.  Hella probably wanted to create a greater demand for chicle, as it isn’t commonly used in gum production any more, creating a more substantial product might be beneficial to the chiclero industry. 

Overall, I think Yves Behar’s solution was more successful.  Hella presented chicle as too much of an art installation, but could have easily packaged the product as a sort of home repair kit, like an adhesive to control the direction of plant growth.