London Design Festival 2018 saw an eclectic range of events spread across the capital. My top 4 design picks came from the London Design Fair in the Old Truman Brewery and are all about innovative in the use of material and production.

Ecobirdy have taken a novel approach to plastic waste by working directly with schools in Italy to collect disused plastic toys. These are then graded by colour, shredded into fine chips and used to create new roto-moulded children’s furniture.

The process avoids using any virgin material and instead relies on the waste plastic containing enough polyethylene to suspend the other colour chips which gives the new furniture a composite marble effect.

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Next is Stockholm based Farg & Blanche’s very zoomorphic Succession Stool.

The base, they explain, is made of an innovative composition of materials which has been dressed in textile and leather and had ropes tied around it before being baked. The results when you cut away the rope is that of a pattern without seams, as brutal as it is sophisticated and refined.

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SASA Works are architects that also make their own furniture and objects, using an industrial aesthetic that boils our kettle.

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Not quite boiled sweets, but definitely eye candy. These beautifully chunky and colourful blown glass vases, from Now Nordic, show off the materials uniqueness with simple box-moulded shape and unapologetically fat proportions.

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