Case Study — Speculative Product & Systems Design
Harbor Forms
Packaging designed for the entire lifecycle of the material, not only the moment someone is holding it.
The Problem
Most sustainable packaging asks you to trust an unfamiliar material without ever telling you what happens to it afterward. A compostable cup that looks and feels exactly like plastic gives you no reason to treat it any differently once it's in your hand.
I wanted to design a container where the material itself communicates what happens to it, so that sustainable behavior does not depend on reading a label and believing it.
The Approach
Harbor Forms uses suspension-based 3D bioprinting with seaweed, so the vessels are grown rather than manufactured. The process is closed-loop, with no synthetic inputs. That constraint determined the shapes. Rather than designing a form and then finding a biodegradable material to make it from, I let the printing process determine which forms were structurally honest. The result is an object whose texture indicates that it came from somewhere and goes back.
Every design decision was tested against one question: does holding this object change how someone thinks about disposal, before they have read a word about it?
What I Learned
Designing for decomposition changes the whole design vocabulary. Symmetry, gloss, and precision are the usual signals of quality, and they all read as artificial once the goal is for something to look grown rather than made. The more irregular the surface became, the more people described the object as trustworthy and biodegradable, before I had told them anything about the material.
It reframed sustainability for me as a UX problem as much as a materials one. The experience of an object has to make the right behavior the obvious one.