Yannic Alidarso‘s Synergy of Colour project aims to make consumers more aware of the origin of the furniture in their home by giving them a participatory role in its production process. Shown at last week’s Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show, Alidarso’s device enables people to create their own pigments from collected organic materials and then apply them as a stain to plain wooden furniture.

The cabinet exhibited at the show was made from bare, elm wood panels which were designed to be decorated using natural pigments collected from nature. For instance, stinging nettles could be used to achieve a deep green colour or wild heather could be used to create a purple pigment. The raw, organic materials are placed into Alidarso’s Colour Extracting device, ground into a fine pulp and mixed with transparent paint.

This is then fed into a flexible tube, which is connected to a needle embedded in the soft wood of the wardrobe. Slowly, the natural pigment seeps into the wood, Yannic sees this as “returning some of the forest to the tree.”

I would love to see a finished wardrobe in different shades of green taken from various types of lettuce or imagine a table in a rainbow of vegetable pigments…the possibilities are endless!

- A.Morris