Over the last five years, the Future Observatory programme has funded more than 100 research projects at universities across the country, with grants ranging from £40,000 to £4 million. That is an unprecedented investment in design research by our partners, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The impact, in terms of focusing design on research and innovation that can drive the green transition, has been hugely significant and will have ripple effects for years to come.
However, there is also a great deal of unsung research being conducted in practice by architects and designers who are trying to change the industries in which they work. There are architects pushing to lower the carbon emissions of buildings, developing innovative timber or stone structures and retrofitting buildings with biomaterials. There are designers experimenting with alternatives to plastics and making products easier to recycle and repair. All of this requires research and development, but sources of funding are few and far between. Unless these practices are lucky to enough to have clients willing to take risks, set environmentally progressive briefs and potentially pay a premium for non-standard materials and methods, then most of that research will never reach the proof-of-concept stage.
Those systems won’t be challenged overnight, but we need a concerted effort to support the prototyping and testing of low-carbon and non-polluting alternatives.
This is why Future Observatory launched the Prototype Grants. The aim of the grants is to support research into sustainable supply chains, with a particular focus on biomaterials and bioregional and regenerative approaches. Designers across disciplines are trapped in business-as-usual models based on global supply chains of polluting and carbon-intensive materials that have had decades to develop ruthless economies of scale. Those systems won’t be challenged overnight, but we need a concerted effort to support the prototyping and testing of low-carbon and non-polluting alternatives.
Given the urgency of that project, and the limited funding to support it, it is no wonder that we were overwhelmed by applications for the Prototype Grants, which award four practices £70,000 each. We received 138 applications, a high number of which were eminently fundable. This made assessing them no easy task. We relied on a network of peer reviewers to help us narrow the field to a shortlist of ten practices, all of whom were funded to develop their proposals. We then brought in a jury of industry experts to select the final four grantees. The jury consisted of Hanif Kara OBE, co-founder and director of structural engineering firm AKT II; architect and engineer Smith Mordak; Judith Loesing, director of architecture and landscape design practice East; architectural historian and educator Neal Shasore; and materials expert and founder of materials practice Ma-tt-er Seetal Solanki.
The judges were looking for research projects that were place-based, had clear potential for impact on industry and a sense of social impact. And we are pleased to announce that the awardees of Future Observatory’s Prototype Grants are:
WeCanMake, with ‘Neighbourhood factory Futures’, a community housebuilding model based on a timber kit of parts for low-rise apartment buildings in Knowle West, Bristol
Local Works Studio, with ‘Ferment’, which will develop plant-based insulation and construction materials using an on-farm production method to ferment agricultural by-products, based in Sussex.
SearoLabs, with ‘SearoSoft’, a prototype for the world’s first seaweed-based single-use earplug, which is targeted at the 40 billion synthetic earplugs that are disposed of every year. SearoLabs is based in Cambridge.
SY Ecofit, with ‘Prototyping PhytoFloc’, which will develop insulation materials from the by-products of phytomining, the use of plants to remediate polluted soil on former industrial land, based in South Yorkshire.
We look forward to working with these four practices and watching their research projects develop over the coming year.
