Material States / Digital Fabrics

Rotterdam-based design studio The New Raw presents a a sustainable collection of furniture with a bold and tactile texture. The studio treats plastic waste as a continuous thread of material which folds, twists and loops to create an intriguing tactile surface that resembles textiles, and which invites users to touch it. The sculpted material texture, consisting of thick layers and knots, creates a tactile, colourful and load-bearing type of surface for outdoor and indoor furniture or other architectural applications with an embodied digitally-crafted materiality.

In this project The New Raw, explores different expressions of plastic and develops a new formal language of digital craftsmanship that combines traditional techniques with the digital fabrication. The New Raw relentlessly pushes the boundaries and buttons to transform recycled plastic through developing tools and new approaches which reinvent craft in the contemporary digital and automated context.

The New Raw is a research and design studio based in Rotterdam (Netherlands) founded in 2015 by architects Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki with the ambition to give new life to discarded materials through design, robots and craftsmanship. The New Raw develops its own (digital) craftsmanship techniques through a formal and technical language that highlights the texture and the layer-by-layer character of its in-house robotic manufacturing process. The exploration of the possibilities that the robotic techniques provide transform plastic waste into beautiful and meaningful products that are 100% circular.