A farming perspective

Tjeerd Veenhoven is a product designer with a love for inventing materials and production techniques. In his mind being a designer is much more than just aesthetics or expressing trends, for him it is closer to activism. From his studio in the North of Holland he experiments with materials and crafts from all over the world, developing new products to strengthen local economies, ecological awareness and design thinking. He is founder of Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven (STV). Besides this he is part of several innovation platforms and advisory boards. Through best practice projects, workshops and consultancy he spreads awareness on biobased materials, sustainable transition and design methods. He was co-founder of HuisVeendam, an innovative company producing decorative interior laminates based on potato starch technology. And in 2016 he was awarded with the H&M Foundation Global Change award for his endeavours to make textiles from green algae. Tjeerd encourages designers to work where challenges are biggest and take a leading role towards a sustainable and more social society.

In this video, Tjeerd discusses the future of agricultural crops in the making of building products.

• The future is not about growing big; but copy paste: small initiatives in the local ecosystem where these things work with local stakeholders for local problems using global thought.
• We have always used agricultural crops for building materials. We just stopped for a while. The problem is that not all crops are suitable for fibers. We have miscanthus, sorghum, cattail, hemp and flax.
• Soil is different across the NL and that influences what we can grow where. In the NL we have clay, which is good for growing food, we have peat, we have sand which is good for hemp.
• In the future we will have farmers for fibers, and farmers for food. Perhaps also farmers for producing biopolymers with which we will build our future plastics.