Arshia Bawa

Nani 1.0 taught me how much possibility could exist within discarded materials. It began with the simple idea of transforming textile scraps into yarn and grew into a series of experiments with weaving, knitting, crochet, fabric, polythene and other forms of waste. The final material was vibrant, tactile and expressive, but once I began looking at it as a material for production rather than purely as an experiment, I realised that there were a few things that needed to evolve. The first was...

If Nani began with a question about what to do with materials that had already been discarded, the next question was much more practical: how do you actually transform them into something useful? My immediate instinct was to turn the fabric scraps into yarn. I have been knitting for years, so yarn is one of the most intuitive textile forms for me to think through. When I look at a piece of fabric, I naturally start thinking about how it could be cut, twisted, joined or transformed into...

Nani began as an exploration of waste, but the more I worked on it, the more it became a question about responsibility. As designers, we spend much of our time thinking about how something should look, feel and function. We think about the person who will use it, the material we will make it from and the story we want it to tell. But there is another question that is just as important: what happens to it when that story is over? Every object we design enters a larger system. Materials are...