Engraft is a new tableware brand founded by Chinese product designer Qiyun Deng. The brand is based around a tableware collection she made during her master’s degree at École cantonale d'art de Lausanne in 2013. The inspiration for its characteristic shape is drawn from plants, and it is made of a material called PLA (polylactic acid), a plastic derived from plants such as corn, sugar cane and cassava. It can be completely degraded through industrial composting, which turns it into carbon dioxide and water. After seven years of exploring and perfecting the production, Qiyun released the first set of her tableware earlier this year. We spoke with her about the cutlery set, the design process, and what happened throughout all these years.

Before you went to Switzerland to study, you studied furniture design for some years. What made you decide to shift to tableware for your graduation design?

Yes, I was actually working as a chair designer before I moved to Switzerland. Originally I wanted to make a very special and ambitious chair for my graduation project in Lausanne. I thought I needed to use my strength, as I had so much experience in chair making. But sometimes because you have been doing something for so long, it can be very hard to think out of the box in a field you are so familiar with. So after a year of struggling with my chair, I decided to look into something I was less experienced in. I had done a workshop in tableware design some time earlier, and I thought it was a subject with a lot more space for exploration.

Around that same time, I started to reflect on things we perceive as ‘cheap’. I am from Guangdong, so I grew up in close proximity to the manufacturing industry, and a lot of people I know work or have worked in this field. During my time in Switzerland, I noticed that the scale of factory production there, and also the market itself, was smaller than what I had known growing up. Because of this, factories don’t have to solve the problems that come with producing on a massive scale and end up being able to make things that are more refined. I was interested in this juxtaposition, in being a part of the evolution of mass production, so I gave myself the task to design something that would be suitable for manufacturing in very large quantities whilst not compromising on quality of design.

Do you have a particular love of eating? What are your requirements for choosing cutlery for yourself?

I don’t think I am a foodie, but I really love the things my mom cooks for me. My mother is very good at Cantonese home cooking. One of my favourites is her meat patties, for which she chops the meat herself, both fatty and lean, and then adds some dried mushrooms and dried squid. This recipe is very specific to the area I’m from, with a southern coastal lifestyle. The flavours here are often fresh and umami. For many of my meals, like most Chinese people, I don’t use cutlery, but a simple pair of chopsticks. I don’t have any special requirements, but my favourite chopsticks are usually square at the top and round at the bottom, with a medium sharp point.

The cutlery set you designed has a very natural look, while also being environmentally friendly. In designing engraft, which of the concepts came first, the biomimicry or the environmentalism?

Definitely the perspective of protecting the environment. As a product designer, the first question I always ask myself is what kind of materials I would like to use. If you are making ‘disposable’ tableware in this day and age, it must be environmentally friendly. After some research, I found a bioplastic called PLA, a plant-based plastic that is sustainable, renewable, and biodegradable. To my surprise, I discovered that disposable tableware in many European supermarkets is already made out of PLA. My problem with the sets I found is that these do not look different compared to traditional disposable plastic tableware — sometimes you even get the feeling they deliberately imitate that ‘cheap look’. The quality of this material goes beyond single usage, but because the design indicates the complete opposite of what the material is capable of, people will throw it out after a single use. I couldn’t believe that designers could be satisfied with using this material like that. One should do something worthy of the good quality of the material. So I started thinking: PLA is plant-based, why don’t I design a shape that relates to its origins? I then bought different fruits and vegetables, made some moulds out of them and grafted the casts onto parts of PLA cutlery I could find at the supermarket.

I first tried to make a set of tableware based on orange skin casts. I then started thinking about synaesthesia, about how our senses influence each other. For example, most of the time, we use a fork for savoury food, so you don’t want to create a strange experience by adding a sweet element to it. Celery does not have a sweet association, so it is more suitable than an orange. After trying many different forms, my wish for the cutlery to be stackable helped in narrowing down the selection.

Is the material 100% biodegradable?

This question is a bit tricky. In my research, I found out that there seems to be a certain misunderstanding about biodegradation. Before getting into PLA, my idea of biodegradable materials was that I could bury bioplastics in my garden and they would disappear. The underlying problem here is that if something degrades that easily, it also means it’s not at all durable. So I needed something biodegradable that also provided enough durability to be useful. At the moment, PLA is strong enough for everyday usage and doesn’t break too easily. For degradation, it needs to go through processes like collecting, sorting, and recycling. After that, you can choose to reuse it or go into industrial composting. This means it is 100% degradable under controlled temperature and humidity levels for a specific amount of time. On the product packaging, I specifically wrote that it is made from plants and fully biodegradable under industrial composting conditions. It is not ‘home compostable’.

This research also made me realise that the general public needs to learn more about these issues. A product being biodegradable is not enough to solve our problems. In the process of actually treating these materials so that they can be re-used or biodegraded, collecting and sorting are the most important procedures — but they bring the least financial profit. Between manufacturers, suppliers, retailers and governments, nobody is willing to take on that responsibility, which makes the development of bioplastics difficult.

How do you feel about the concept of products being disposable?

I think disposable objects are quite unethical. They stem from a lifestyle invented in the United States in the nineteen-fifties, which should be outdated in the world we live in now. The pollution caused by disposable plastic products can no longer be ignored. In addition to the fact that fossil-based plastics are unsustainable and difficult to decompose, the ‘use and discard’-lifestyle is a big part of the problem.

I believe that a good product allows people to establish an emotional connection to it, thereby fostering the habit of cherishing things. I wanted to emphasize the fact that PLA is made of natural resources through a design that reminds people of nature — to make them feel that this cutlery has a life of its own, and have them think for a second or two before they want to throw it away. By doing so, it can hopefully help reverse some of the stereotypes about plastic being cheap and not durable.

You designed the cutlery in 2013, but it only hit the market this year. What took so long?

It wasn’t my intention to produce it myself when I finished the design. I got several enquiries from companies in Europe and the US who were interested in manufacturing it. But as I mentioned before, PLA mainly existed to replace the traditional oil-based plastics, and its possibilities have rarely been explored. For a company to produce engraft, that would mean they’d have to invest a lot of time, energy and resources into studying the material — which didn’t make financial sense for these companies. So after several years of back and forth with different companies, I decided to give it a try myself. I was very lucky to find a small factory on Alibaba. The owners also didn’t think of it as a project that would bring them lots of money quickly, but they were very interested in trying things together. The competition in the manufacturing industry in Guangdong is very intense, and the factory believed that pushing the production with PLA would be a good investment in the future. So from 2015 on we did countless tests together, trying to perfect the recipe for the PLA and colouring the material, and finally in January 2020 we made the first batch of products that met our standards.

What are your plans for engraft in the future?

I will continue to polish the products that still need more attention, like the cups, plates, chopsticks and so on. I may also try to release a children's tableware series, considering the material and shape of engraft seem quite suitable. I definitely want to make more things people actually need. For example, people living in big cities in China need to ensure their dietary health while living a fast-paced life. More and more people start to bring their own lunches to work, but there are not enough nicely designed lunch boxes of good quality that are made of sustainable materials. So that might also be a good market to get into. But my lowest expectation for engraft is that I finish what I started: a complete set of beautiful and environmentally friendly tableware.

To find out more about engraft, check here.

Interview: Junshen Wu
Copy Editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photography: Junshen Wu
Set Design: Yannic Moeken and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain
Process photos and illustrations: Qiyun Deng