Making Progress

Almost for a month, I'm doing my internship at the Science Park and my notebook looks like a wild diary. I get a lot of input from different actors and it's a good feeling. Though, it took a while since I got to this point...

Conceptualising a project asks for several skills, also the willingness to rely on other persons whose knowledge is very crucial for oneself. This, however, can be the reason for why a project delays or does not proceed as quickly as one would like. It can appear as frustrating but since I like to take the best out of any situation, it also demands to rethink own actions, as in: what else could I do in the meantime? Here, one is able to figure out tasks that can run parallel and can be crucial for future assignments.

I had a meeting with one of the main project initialisers from last year and her ideas were very valuable to me. Out of the conversation, I realised that my position is needed especially for the product development, how the design of the bags needs to be adjusted in order to be semi-automated and, hence, feasible. With this in mind, I had another meeting with the CEO from Kinna Automatic who is very supportive in driving the project forward. Kinna Automatic is a well established automated manufacturing specialised in pillows and duvets. We disassembled the current textile bags to get an idea about the manufacturing and stitching types and came up with several questions that I had to ask the company Reused Remade from Stockholm. With their answers, we are able to evaluate how far automation could be possible or even worthwhile. At the moment I feel quite optimistic that we could come up with ideas for redesigning but I assume that I need to calm my expectations a little. But we'll see in the next weeks! :)

All in all, I enjoy working on the project and being in constant dialogue with the project's company, Re:Textile tries to provide tools for being a circular business ideally producing in Sweden. I think that my attempt to find solutions also encourages them to keep on improving.

Today, I had a company visit at the Tvätteriet from Alingsås to get to know the laundry process sheets are going through. It was a very interesting insight, where collecting, sorting, washing, drying and calendering and eventually folding was demonstrated. We are on the discovery how the cutting could be included in the laundry facility so that the sheets don't have so much time to lose their shape. Did you know that the sheets that consist of Cotton and Polyester lose their Cotton fibres after approximately 125 washing times so that eventually the sheets mainly consist of PES? This fact was very interesting to know since automation via ultrasonic, for instance, is more suitable for Polyester fabrics. Let's see where this information may lead to.