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Seaweed slips between labels. Depending on the perspective, it can be food, habitat, contamination, material… In some places it is harvested and eaten without a second thought, in others it gathers on the shoreline. What can designers see and find in seaweed? A fuel, pigment, textile, or maybe a choreography, a sculpture or even gummybears?

The last week of February, a group of students, Julia Varis, Giulia Rinaldo, Müge Yildiz, Yongsub Shin and Georgia Gathungu, as well as Aalto faculty Professor Julia Lohmann and Ena Naito, packed their suitcases and switched their classrooms and cold Finland for the warm coast of Portugal as part of an Erasmus+Blended Intensive Programme (BIP). This short term format allows for combining an online exchange on a topic with some time abroad to be immersed in the context. In this case, this process of knowledge sharing and co-designing was centred around biomateriality through the lens of seaweed.

Participants gathered at ISMAT university in Portimão: students from the ISMAT itself, as well as other universities, arriving from Turkey, Belgium, Ireland and Finland. The group had already first met online through lectures and discussions, but the shift to the coast grounded the discussion in place. Algae were approached from different perspectives; ecological, speculative, material and design-thinking driven.

Hosted by Susana Leonor and Américo Mateus, leaders of the biolab at ISMAT, the group of participants brought together designers from Bachelor students to PhD researchers, who were from a variety of countries further than just the participating universities. What formed was a multidisciplinary setting shaped by people and place. “Feeling like coming home”, is how Ena Naito described it, the founder and head of Aalto’s BioMakerStudio, who had been collaborating with ISMAT before. Aalto students and professor Julia Lohmann echoed this: even though they had not been there before, they were very taken by the generous and open welcome, and remembered fondly how the ISMAT team had been happy to show them around and follow their ideas wherever they might lead.

The workshop moved between the shoreline, the lab and the studio, while algae was not just discussed, but touched, harvested and collected, pressed, dried, documented, grounded, painted, woven… Observation, experimentation and making all worked together. Field visits and lab work fed directly into each other. The biolab was an active, living and responsive space where staff encouraged free exploration and experiments regardless of how unconventional they might appear at first. Processes were invented and adjusted on the go. This combination of adaptive structure and flexibility within a very limited time, allowed for participants to concentrate and follow curiosity rather than a strict brief and led to a wealth of creative experiments.

The ideas and connections formed during this time did not remain in Portugal; they travelled with the participants into their familiar contexts. In Finland, the experiments done with Atlantic species made participants reflect on the Baltic ecosystem. One Aalto student told me how their unsuccessful attempt to extract red pigment from a Red algae in Portugal, resurfaced as Finnish Bladderwrack was releasing pigment on the frozen shoreline of Lauttasaari. Dots started to connect and plans for this process are ongoing.

Not everything translated sadly: Julia Lohmann showed a seaweed she had brought back from Portugal which had now completely dried out and lost the qualities, that had made it originally interesting to her. Not it sits in her office at Aalto waiting to be reconsidered. These moments of disappointment and discovery, are just as much of the process as the successes.

What remains after this intensive program in not a single outcome but an ongoing ecosystem and network of ideas and explorations across places. Algae exploration has made participants reconsider their environment, explore early prototypes and form a library of vocabulary and approaches to biomateriality. This exchange links design education to ecological realities and space for collaboration with other creatives, scientists and organisms.