Month: March 2012

How to grow a Stool Cover

It always amazes me how many extra ordinary chair stories there are out there. The Xylinum stool by German designer Jannis Hülsen is grown, at least the cover of the stool.

First Jannis takes a reasonably normal stool: The Naked Xylinum.
Then he applies the bacterial cellulose mixture:

Xylinum is a research project that poses the question: what could future materials and production processes be like? The title Xylinum is the name of the bacterium which produces an artificial cellulose material. This bacterium consumes sugar and builds a cellulose fiber structure around any given form. Since the process takes place in a nutrition liquid, the wet material can be dried later on, resulting in a durable and 100 % biodegradable material. The properties of this material can be adjusted by changing the genetic code of the organisms. In collaboration with the company Jenpolymers, a technique was developed to create a »skin« around a wooden stool frame, forming the coating and seating surface.

And here a photo sequence of the drying process of the bacterial cellulose which takes 2 days::

Trocknungsprozeß from jannis on Vimeo.

Via Disignboom.