Origin
Plastics

Origin Plastics is a micro-business focused on turning post-consumer recycled plastic into homeware products worth buying. Not a charity case — the premise is that waste material, handled with enough design rigour, can be genuinely desirable. The placement was part of my third year at RGU.

It was fully remote throughout. COVID had closed every studio in the country, which meant all the work happened on screen — no workshop access, no physical prototyping, no handling the material. That constraint shaped what was possible and, honestly, what wasn't.

The core challenge at Origin isn't aesthetic. It's perception. People associate recycled plastic with cheap, short-lived, disposable goods — regardless of what the material can actually do. Every design decision was an argument against that assumption.

Early exploration covered a wide range of domestic typologies — the question at this stage was where form, tactility, and surface continuity could do the most work in reframing the material. Sketching ran alongside CAD. Not sequential — both happening at once, testing whether what looked good in line would hold up as a solid.

The constraint was always present. 100g maximum shot weight. That rules out a lot. Large objects with thick walls, anything requiring multiple complex parts, anything that needs a secondary process to join. The brief was already narrowing the field before the form decisions started.

The goal wasn't variety for its own sake — it was range. Testing how far the material could be pushed visually before it stopped making sense to produce it.

The watering can landed as the primary concept. Clear functional requirements, enough formal freedom to push the material, and a recognisable typology that would let the surface quality read against something familiar.

The forms leaned into curvature — sweeping transitions, continuous surfaces, visual weight distributed through the body rather than the walls. The intention was to make recycled plastic look deliberate. Something produced with the same consideration as cast iron or blown glass.

In CAD it looked right. The curves emphasised material flow. The proportions were generous without being heavy. It passed the visual test.

The constraints pointed clearly. Simpler geometry. Cleaner draft angles. Fewer undercuts. Surfaces that could still carry the material quality the watering can was trying to demonstrate — just without the tooling complexity that killed it.

The lamp emerged from those conditions. A typology with cleaner part separation, more forgiving geometry, and surfaces that reward the same curved, continuous treatment. The form was resolved in CAD and taken through to KeyShot for final visualisation.

The material logic stayed the same throughout: recycled plastic handled with enough care becomes worth keeping. The object changed. The argument didn't.

No physical prototype. The project didn't reach tooling — remote working meant no workshop access, and the pivot to the lamp happened late enough in the placement that production feasibility testing wasn't possible in the time available.

What exists is a full digital concept: initial survey research, ideation sketches, two rounds of CAD development across two typologies, manufacturing-informed iteration, and final KeyShot renders of the lamp.

A portion of the work was retained internally by Origin. The renders and documentation here represent the full scope of what was produced during the placement.