Monday 2 July 2012

Nienke van de Pol


Collection: Kitchen Lab





Design vision
With my Kitchen Lab collection I want people to learn that plants and herbs at our doorsteps have preventive and curative medical properties. By exploring Kitchen Lab you will find how easy it is to make your own self care remedies for everyday ailments.  The ingredients needed can be found in your kitchen and garden. Suffering from  hay fever? Just make an infusion of stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) and German chamomile (Matricaria rucutita).  Today’s circumstances force us to take the initiative when it comes to our health.

Born: 1989 Wageningen NL
Nienke was an intern at Arnout Visser
Contact and information:
Research and Inspiration
There’s a globally expanding community made up of people who grow their own plants and herbs in their gardens and allotments, using their harvest to produce their own foods and medicines.  During my studies I got more and more involved with this community. Last year I made a book based on interviews with the owners of garden allotments and people who cultivate and process plants, fruits and herbs from their gardens. I visited seminars and started making my own medicines, gathering information on how to improve on the way to make them and the tools needed. As a next step I started to design sets for making medicines and common household remedies. They are five in number.  I designed a set to extract substances form herbs by way of simple infusion. Two other sets enable you to extract herbal compounds with the help of oil or vinegar and alcohol. The fourth set offers you the possibility to make herbal syrups by way of au bain-marie technique. By the help of the fifth you can make your own balms and ointments on the basis of fat or bee wax. Along with the sets comes a book for instruction. I took a lot of effort and study in optimizing the functionality of my sets.  The necks of my containers are narrow to minimiz4e the degrading effect of oxygen on herbal substances, but the mouths are wide to make filling them easy. I also found out a way to make stirring, every so often needed for extraction with oil or vinegar, a matter of play. All functionality notwithstanding the way my sets look is important as well. After all, this school is about design and I want my products to be expressive of the fresh and fascinating world of homemade medicine.



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