Speaking Material with Chris Lefteri

Chris Lefteri invites us to the mysterious world of CMF. How do you bridge the gap between material industries and designers. Why does the material come first in the creative design process and what role does color play? What innovation is happening in the intrinsic world of materials and how does this relate to topics of circularity and recyclability? Material guy Chris Lefteri gives insight on how he builds stories around materials and the challenges he encounters in a world in search of sustainable materials. 

Chris Lefteri is an internationally recognised authority in materials and their application in design. The work of his studio and publications have been pivotal in changing the way designers and the materials industry consider materials. His books include Materials for Design and six other titles in the Materials for Inspirational Design series. Chris Lefteri Design has locations in London and Seoul and works with multiple Fortune 100 companies. His studio is widely recognised as one of the leading studios working in the field of materials & CMF. In 2018 he launched FixIts, his first materials driven brand. 

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Transcript

Judith van Vliet: Welcome back to the Color Authority. This is Judith van Vliet podcasting out of Milan, Italy. And today, I'm going to be interviewing Chris Lefteri. he is an internationally recognized authority in materials under application and design. The work of his studio publications have been pivotal in changing the way designers and the materials industry consider materials. His books include Materials for Design and six other titles in the Materials for Inspirational Design series. Chris Lefteri design has locations in London and CEO and works with multiple 1400 companies. His studio is widely recognized as one of the leading studios working in the field of materials and CMF. In 2018, he launched Fixits, his first materials driven brand. Let's listen to Chris and what he has to say about this mysterious world of CMF. Good afternoon, Chris. How are you today? And welcome on the Color Authority.

Chris Lefteri: How you do? I'm good, thank you. I apologize for my sniffles that you might be able to detect in my voice, but I'm apart from that very well, thanks.

Judith van Vliet: So, Chris, I ask and it's been now I think it's actually this is my third year that I've had the podcast of Color Authority, and I ask everybody that same question, and I'm very curious for your answer because I've had multiple, but what is color to you, Chris?

Chris Lefteri: Well, obviously, I look at this through the lens of materials, and it's the introduction to the material. It's the thing that you see from a distance before you even know what the material is. It's the thing that you perceive close up. It tells you something about what it is you're about to experience before you hold it, before you pick up on the senses, before you perceive the coldness or the hardness or the weight or before you see grain in the wood. And it's really that introduction between what's behind the skin. And it's the first point of that introduction that the material has to you. And it also has this ability to communicate the honesty, the nature of the material and I think give you a sense of its provenance. Because obviously, from a distance, if I see bright colors, I perceive them not to be natural. And it does have an incredible amount of weight in terms of the emotions that a material gives and how you feel about that material. And it contributes to positive and negative emotions as well.

Judith van Vliet: Color, at least is highly emotion because literally it does something to you. But also, what we always discuss, especially in color marketing group, you've been part of our summit last year, and also we talked a lot about color, material and finish. Of course, one of the few things that everybody agrees on is that color is emotions, and there's no way to get around that. So even when it comes to materials and finishes, still, color has, let's say, that component that makes people literally emotional. You think that we look at material and color, the way they play together. Which one comes first for you? Material or the color?

Chris Lefteri: In terms of the emotion, I think, to me, they're interconnected. You can't really separate them. I think it's something that, as you move forward in terms of the use of recycled content, will become more critical because it actually communicates well. It potentially has a lot to communicate in terms of that story of the provenance of the material, where it came from. But I think that they're both quite equal to me. Obviously, I break materials down into three components that are important. The emotional part that the material plays, the sensory part that the material plays, and the functional role that material has. And I think sensory is obviously a huge part of. But in terms of how materials make us feel, it's a huge part of that. I mean, for me, color and materials are completely entwined. I can't really separate the two. And something that I've been using a lot recently that I've kind of rediscovered is the original iMac, which had that beautiful translucency. And that is a complete icon in terms of CMF, because, yes, you have this fantastically different shape, that kind of curved volume that comes from the industrial design, but you also have this material and color combination that really can change the way that we felt about computing and made computing fun. It made computing part of our environments, part of our desk space. And getting that balance between the translucency of the polycarbonate or the transparency that polycarbonate offers and mixing that with the color, I think, is probably one of the best examples of that marriage between material and color and the impact that it has on our emotions or the lack of color. If you'd had no color in those computers, if it were just transparent, then that technology would have been completely visible. It wouldn't have had the same kind of pop and fun computing quality to it.

Judith van Vliet: I think that is also one of the examples I use most when my clients say, like, name me one product where color really changed the game within a company. I'm like, Well, Apple literally going from highly functional computers in beige, not the sexiest color on Earth, to the Bondi Blue. And then, obviously they did multiple, but Bondi Blue was obviously Bondi Beach surfing. That was the whole game of why they had, obviously, that color to something that literally people wanted to buy because it wasn't object of image, concept, design and beauty. I mean, it changed their game completely from who they were before and who they are even, I guess, still today.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And obviously, they've kind of reintroduced the color because I think there was a period where it became white aluminium or titanium, and that color kind of got forgotten a little bit. And then it came back with the accessories, and then it came back with the covers for the phones. And then it came back with a little bit with the anodizing of the aluminium. But I think that first one was incredibly significant. No one ever really talks about it as a CMF thing, but absolutely, it's about colored materials and finishes.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, that's a little bit probably also where CMF got so much in the picture, because you run a material let design studio that bridges that gap exactly between material industry and the design community. Can you explain a little bit what it is that you do? Because it sounds very mysterious.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, I have to explain it quite often when I do. I have to explain it to designers, what I do. And it's quite hard because if you say, I'm a product designer, I'm an ID designer, I'm a UX designer, people kind of know what that is. The easiest thing for me to say is, I'm a CMF designer, but that's not quite true. I'm more of a materials than M part in the CMF. And I think if I can try to put it into a nutshell, it would be that you have materials that are developed for multiple applications, and then you have designers and you say you have, let's say, engineering and technical and chemistry on one side, and you have design on the other. And I bridge that space because the materials have quite often or quite often are missing this story that relates to a creative use. So I kind of translate that. My studio, we find these materials. We then build stories around them that relate to what the client wants. We then analyze them in terms of the story they bring, the brand, the ability they have for an enhanced marketing story or in a consumer story, or how it may be empowers a designer to design in a different way. And it's that, yes, essentially that bridge between the technical, the engineering, and what the value it has to a designer. I think it's very important to try and work with designers in car companies or electronics companies and try and extract the value from that material, because that material has many, many different stories. You just have to identify the story that's most relevant for that particular project.

Judith van Vliet: So you speak material. That's the language that you speak.

Chris Lefteri: I speak material. I can communicate with 1000 different tongues.

Judith van Vliet: See, material is something that and I think you share that vision is something that is inherent to what it was made of, where it comes from, how people are educated to use that material, but also merely where it was born, where it was created, where it was produced, but also the simplicity of a material and respecting that. And that is also a little bit about what you do with a material centered approach. And using Dieter Ram's obviously very famous ten principles for good design, how are those ten principles influencing what you do? And how do you think that they're still so relevant for designers today, even if the world has changed so much since Dieter Rams, of course, had developed those principles.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the umbrella one is that it's about honesty and it's about being sympathetic, as you said, to what the material has to offer. I mean, I did my own take on those principles in relation to materials because I thought it's such a powerful message. And I think the principles are important because still I have to do a lot of explaining, like I said to designers, to say, well, this is why it's important. This is how you can break down the value of materials, and particularly focusing on sustainability, because there are certain for example, one of the principles is that materials should be first. And I think that's particularly important not just in the creative process, but also in terms of sustainability. That design and materials impact can have a huge impact on not just the environmental attributes of material, but actually the story that it can tell, and also how to use the material from a design perspective. And I think that's something else, another principle, which is that technology transfer from one place into something else, and that translation speaking materials. You have to kind of break it down and say, well, if I know what I know about organizations of big clients, if I recommend the coolest materials on the planet, it's never going to happen. So we have to kind of manage that and say, well, let's not just think about new materials. Let's think about how to take a material and use it in a new way, or material and think about how to use it in a new process, a new way of processing it. And I think they're quite useful because you have to educate not just designers, but I think anybody's working in those kinds of organizations that are producing products, objects, cars, in terms of the value of materials.

Judith van Vliet: Yes, and how obviously they can improve even working with the existing materials, which obviously still most consumer goods and automotive, that is plastic. So what they would be able to do with the current materials to actually produce better and obviously in a more sustainable way.

Chris Lefteri: Yes, absolutely. And I think this conversation on sustainability is I mean, it really needs to be addressed in terms of certain ways that it can be approached, because the world has changed considerably since I first started writing about materials, and even vocabulary has become very honed and very finely tuned. And there are certain words that I feel that we can't use anymore, like biomaterial, because even if you look up, do a search for biomaterial, you'll get maybe three different definitions, and sometimes neither of those definitions are actually valuable in terms of what you want to achieve. And I prefer not to use a vague term like that because it's like, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about circular material? Are we talking about a material that regenerates? Are we talking about a material that degrades and compost? Because let's decide here.

Judith van Vliet: I think most people with bio think of a material that degrades within time. But indeed, just as you said when you look up online, not necessarily, that is what people mean. And that's, again, you speak the language of material because even using the right vocabulary in what you do is extremely important. Right?

Chris Lefteri: Yes, it is. Another aspect of what we do, which is, I think, relevant to this discussion on vocabulary and language, is quite often we work with the material side, the material suppliers, because they realize the value of design and the impact that design has in terms of material selection, in terms of designers being a customer, not just engineers, not just procurement sourcing teams. And material suppliers come from very generally chemists or technically minded people, which is a very different mindset. And just to understand how to talk to, let's say designers is really important in that really important in that respect. And part of that work we do for the material supplies is the education in terms of, well, designers, maybe tentacle designers are going to be interested in a data sheet, but it's not the first thing they want to see. It's like bring some stuff out, bring some samples out, let the material do the talking, let the material say what it wants to be to the design and let that space between what you don't say and what they can imagine to be the creative moment. So that's an important story to tell.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah. I mean, this happens when you work in color as well, because you do work with, obviously, suppliers. And you have to, especially if you're going to pick out the color on this given material. You're going to talk to the technicians as well, because not all color just can be copy pasted onto every material for the result that possibly design wise, the designer was looking for. Especially when they work with mood boards and not very realistic materials and color applications, which, unfortunately, still very often is the case. And if you don't know how to do that translation, there's a lot of not so cool surprises that are waiting for you along the production line of getting that material out with the right color, with the right text finish within, obviously, timeline. Also, that's very short for some companies because they have an introduction day plan in which they want the product to be on the market and everything can go wrong within that choice because as you said, material needs to come first. And what we then say as color designers and then comes color, because when you know what material you're going to be using, you also know if you can apply a certain color or not. So it's funny that the conversations are very similar when it comes to color. Color and material.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah. And getting that. I mean, you're right. So the material not just in the raw material, but in terms of the surface texture, that skin affecting how the color is perceived. So getting that right and having two samples next to each other, which have different surfaces can appear slightly different. But I love that aspect of what I did. Problem solving.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, it's intriguing. Do you think the materials needs have changed since you first started and you first wrote your first books on material and on the CMF part? Do you think those issues have really, let's say, the problems that you're solving, have they changed or are they still quite similar from when you first started?

Chris Lefteri: I think before I get to the point of that question, the specific point you're asking if I think back 2021 years ago, 22 years ago, when I actually started to write about materials, and material libraries started to emerge. So before that, you had nothing. You had data sheets, and that was it. You didn't have anything else. There wasn't that touchyfeely Material Library thing, which for us as designers was just incredible eye opener of amazing formulations, amazing opportunities in terms of processing and stories and function. But that, I think, changed very relatively quickly, within a short, maybe about ten years, to become something that was really about, okay, these are great toys. He's a great inspiration, but welcome to the world of commercial materials and production. Let's talk about sourcing. Let's talk about dollars and cents. Let's talk about having to have multiple material suppliers completely. I wouldn't say completely because Material Library still exists, but I think that it became very apparent that there had to be more to it. It wasn't just about inspiration. It wasn't just about this niche supplier in the Midwest somewhere who could produce 1000 sheets, this material a year, because that's all right if you're an interior designer, but not for mass production and not for a car. So I think that's something that's really changed. But the most significant change in terms of getting back to your point, which was the needs of design, the most significant dramatic change has been information related to sustainability. I mean, the like cannot describe in any other comparison. It's almost like it was when we stopped smoking in bars and pubs or on the London Underground. It was like that dramatic, where you kind of think, how was it like that before? But it's happening so quickly that material supplies the world. US as people, as a population haven't managed to catch up because it's still incredibly difficult to get the right kind of information, particularly focused on sustainability, from the material. So you have lifecycle analysis and you have data on, let's say, very generic materials. But if you've got anything that's new, that data doesn't exist, it hasn't been put into the system. And so to make comparisons between, let's say, materials that come from renewable resources compared to, let's say, you know, petrochemicals like ABS, polystyrene, it's really hard to get. So I think that's the most significant difference. Without a doubt. Without a doubt.

Judith van Vliet: I think you probably get requests about sustainable materials. Like you probably even get a ton per week. But I think that is obviously something that the world is catching up because that's literally what we're doing. I mean, sustainable materials is not a new thing, just there's new ones being born every day. Because now it's such a big focus point because it's no longer a trend, it's something that is required. And there's a lot of companies, especially in packaging, that are currently literally waiting on the sideline because they have no idea what regulation is going to be like for a single use, packaging especially. And they're just waiting. They're just waiting. Less weight. What Brussels will come up with. Maybe it was about time, don't you think, that people were actually thinking about material in a more sustainable way? Especially when it comes obviously to plastics?

Chris Lefteri: Yes, there is this catch up and it's like a chicken, not a chicken and egg, but it is catch up. And somebody described it to me once as the Wild West because it's like everything is going off at the same time. So you have companies who produce the raw material, who are starting to invest in research into recycled material, into certain aspects of using bio content, a mass balance approach. And at the same time you've got their customers, the organizations who are producing at the big electronics companies or car companies who still haven't really established a very clear path to what sustainability means. And I think this is something that I encounter all the time because obviously we're doing a lot of work and researching, investigating sustainable materials and processes. But I can present 1000 different scenarios for here's a material that fits the environment and the beneficial aspect of it in this way. Here's another one that comes from this. But the brand owners, these big organizations have to define and say, well, you know what, our approach is going to be that we only want to focus on materials that can be recycled or we only want to focus on machines that are using renewable energy to produce those products. And without that, then where do you stand? What's your stance? And there are some companies that compostable materials. Sure, it's great in terms of products, but others it's not. But they have to define that. And I think very few companies, even though they have these great and grand sustainability targets, getting to the nitty gritty of what that means in terms of the physical stuff still feels very undefined.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, I agree with that. It's very easy to fall in that big trap of obviously what is greenwashing as well today. I mean, it's beautiful to have websites full of what your targets are, but then in the end, the physical, the action that they're taking, not always is aligning. As you said, storytelling is huge. And telling the sustainable story, how do you help customers with that? Because once they have defined, let's say, that they have a certain direction within the field of sustainability, you help them as well with storytelling because that's what you do. And in the workshop that we did with you in Tucson last year, in November, it was very fun to define a material and give the material a name, a story, an age. You really made the material come alive. Right. And that is something that you help designers with, so that it actually is something that becomes more I guess you give the material the value that it should be given from the first place. Right?

Chris Lefteri: Yeah. So that exercise is really about saying, okay, think about what the stories are that this material has. And that exercise is no right or wrong. It's just to think about the personality of a material and its ability to contribute to a story. I think that to bring color back into this. So this color thing, I think, is particularly important because as we're using more recycled material, you have to let's just focus on plastic, be very conscious of the limit of colouring that type of material. And I think providing guidelines for designers on what are the limits, what are the opportunities, and what are the restrictions, and how do you play to those restrictions, I think is really quite exciting. I'm more interested in the challenges and turning challenges into something positive than I am by saying, yeah, you can put any color into it. It's like okay, great. I'd much rather suddenly say it's just going to be black. Right? Because then how do you bring the value out? And I think this idea of this effect, which we referred to as speckles, which seems to be dominating the CMF world of recyclability, because it is very evident of these colored particles in this matrix. I think that's one aspect of it. But that's difficult to bring those colors and that texture into something that is recycled because of we're collecting a lot of waste that comes from different color sources. We put black dye in it because otherwise it's just going to be a gray, mulchy color. But I think there are all ways of dealing with that. And I think that's a really critical point, because if I think back to the 1950s, when plastics was this incredible.

Judith van Vliet: Material, it was a hero that, once developed, could do so many things for us.

Chris Lefteri: Absolutely. And it was the future, and it was optimistic. The world was optimistic, and it was bright, and it was multicolored because that's what color was going to give. And then when we started thinking about using, let's say, wood fiber, because that was one of the first, let's say, bio based uses of plastic, mixing with plastic, then it became this kind of oati kind of oatmeal color, right? Because you see these specks in it, sort of like a cereal. And that was right, because that was like signifying. It was green. It was at that time, it was perceived as being good for the environment.

Judith van Vliet: Let's debunk that myth for people who still think that that actually is because obviously, if you're mixing fibers with something that is a pit or chemical, which is indeed a plastic, it's not sustainable, right? She can't separate them.

Chris Lefteri: You can't separate them. No, you can't currently. But there are companies who are looking into that. And that's another thing. That's another moving target that we have to worry about. But that celebration, the optimism of the 1950s, I think is really important. And I am really very interested in how we use the psychology to draw consumerism into the sustainable story rather than the guilt. Because you're playing with two emotions. I buy something that isn't as nice, but I feel less guilty. Or I can buy something that looks fantastic and beautiful and stunning, maybe because it has speckles in it and it's waste and it's great for the environment. So I'd rather be that one. I'd rather you buy something, you consume something and be joyful in it because you're going to be more likely to buy it because you feel guilty. And how do you do that with color? How do you do that with effects and maybe blending colors together because you can't separate them. I think there are some good examples of supermarkets who have embraced this idea that we don't always have to have the exact same color in our food packaging because if it's coming from recycled sources, it's going to be hard. Right? Let's just have it different colors. I mean, somebody do something bold like that because it's like selling ugly food, right? Sell ugly color. It wasn't ugly, but it was just different.

Judith van Vliet: There's no such thing as ugly color.

Chris Lefteri: Come on. They were quite nice palette colors. But what I mean, it's like you class them, that kind of thing in the ugly fruit. There's no such thing as an ugly fruit, right? I mean, we're conditioned by these huge brands to demand perfection. And I think that and you can clearly see that's changing now. My mother gave me a little box of ugly strawberries the weekend. They look pretty good to me.

Judith van Vliet: And they were tasty, right?

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, they were tasty. So embracing color difference, I think it's a celebration. But to me, it's about that emotive thing and making sure that we can try and bring that emotive story into materials to become a celebration rather than.

Judith van Vliet: And the storytelling very clearly, the storytelling is important when you select a certain materials of the color and also explaining so through storytelling, explaining the client it looks the way it does because of this and this material being used, it being more sustainable. Hence the color is looking different. Also, the color has its own cycles, right? And its own imperfection. But very clearly, color is a part of what you do, and it plays a big role in the projects that you have with clients. Right?

Chris Lefteri: Yes, it does. To give you another example of managing color in terms of plastic materials, one of the areas that you can look at to reduce carbon footprint of products is to remove coatings. You're removing steps in that process. You're removing a skin on the material. But sometimes you need that because you've got, let's say, an engineering plastic, which has very high performance properties that you need to match, but it doesn't mold so well. So you see flow lines, et cetera, et cetera. So some of the projects we've done is to take these high performing plastics and say, all right, well, let's just see if we can color them. Let's see what we can do with them, where they retain their natural flow. Technical flow. Yeah, exactly. Rather than having to paint them. It comes back to the ugly and celebrating the ugly. Right? And managing the ugly. Yes. And I think these kinds of projects are very we have a very specific problem to solve, but quite exciting. And let's see what we find along the way, because maybe there is this beautiful flow line that we can pick up on by making the change in the gloss level of the surface.

Judith van Vliet: And you come along surprises as well, like good surprises, color surprises, when you let things occur naturally, right?

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, absolutely. It's all about trying things and putting things through a machine.

Judith van Vliet: What is innovation for you? What does that mean? Is it really I mean, a lot of people look at innovation and they think only about the new, exactly what you said in the beginning. They're like so new material, something that others haven't used before, but that not necessarily is innovation. How do you see innovation?

Chris Lefteri: I'm really focused on how organizations can use materials more fluidly. It's a common problem, which I alluded to before, that for these huge multinational companies to implement, let's say not even a new material, but let's say a different material is very challenging. When I first started doing this kind of work, like I said, it was enough to show these cool materials because everybody was wowed, and everybody was inspired. And let me use it. That's kind of straightforward to do. But what's harder and what I'm more inspired in terms of innovation is how organizations are set up so that this fluidity of just let's just talk about sustainable materials is managed. And that's managed across engineering. It's managed across sourcing industrial design materials and CMF. And innovation to me is those organizations that are able to bring those things together and actually pull out some really compelling material, stories, material, products.

Judith van Vliet: You think color can play a role in this innovation? Or do you think color can be, when applied in a certain way, can actually be part of. That whole innovation story.

Chris Lefteri: I mean, it goes back to the iMac, right? I mean, color is critical in it. You just have to tune the dial and decide where do you want what is the story that you want to tell? And managing color within that story?

Judith van Vliet: What are those requests that you receive most today when it comes to materials? Is it the sustainability topic or is there anything other, something curious going on that the listeners are not aware of?

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, I think by far sustainability is the leading discussion. We just did a project with collaboration with Adobe or Adobe Substance, which was exploring an area that I think ten years ago was really a dominant area in terms of materials. And that was smart materials, materials that react to an environment, a stimulus, heat, and looking at how those technologies can be used in a digital way. And I think that that's really an exciting area. Not just I mean, there is that aspect of it which is about a creative tool for designers to use, but I think also realizing, let's say, innovation through a digital way, it's quite difficult to do in a physical experiment just because you have to get the materials. You have to have a space, you have to invest time, whereas you can explore things in a digital way very quickly through these smart materials. So I think that's something that it did surface and then just dropped out of the scene and then I think now has come back into getting people's attention because of the idea of being online and digital meta-verse and everything, et cetera.

Judith van Vliet: I think everything that's very sensory generally seems to be coming back because after COVID not being able to see touch feel, I do feel that haptics are ever more important and also because we are getting more vulnerable as human beings, especially with climate change. I do feel that the sensory so the smart materials, as you call them, are actually something that I think, trend wise, would be something that we could be seeing more and more moving forward.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, sure. I think that's partly why you see a lot of students who are developing their own materials. And I think it's because they want to play, they want to experiment and get their hands dirty. That was a big kind of not underground movement, but it's absolutely one of the most biggest areas of innovation that I see coming out of colleges all over the world.

Judith van Vliet: Is that what excites you from new materials coming up? Is it those students that are just getting their creative heads together and you never know what they're going to create? Of course. But where do you think that future lays in innovative materials that perhaps are not yet ready for manufacturing processes?

Chris Lefteri: This is a little vent to any students who might be listening. When you're doing these projects and you're selecting them, just leave out the mushrooms, because it's like I've seen thousands of projects that I want to use mycelium. Okay, all right. What are you going to do that's different? All the bacterial cellulose. Okay. But you know, this person has done this, this person has done that. So leave that one out. Leave those two out. I would say that the idea of waste is I mean, you know, going back to the 1950s in plastic, I think the material equivalent. And, and, you know, so so in my mind, we had this huge climb in innovation after the Second World War and then after the 1960s, it kind of peaked and it didn't really do anything. I think that point in the 1950s and 60s where you had this growth in plastics, you can see again, but it's coming from waste. There is no aspect of waste that has not been turned into a material. And I think that's very exciting. The problem is very often coming from students, very often coming from students, which is great, but the difficulty is to upscale because with any waste, there's no guarantee of supply chain. So from a business case, it's challenging, but I think there are examples that I hope do take off.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah. There's a lot of buzz currently about regenerative materials. Regenerative materials seem to be indeed something that a lot of people are talking about. It is indeed less at a manufacturing level. Perhaps it's more indeed at a level of students and young designers that are working on a smaller scale. But do you believe that these also are materials that could be part of our future, our material future?

Chris Lefteri: Regenerative? You mean renewable?

Judith van Vliet: Rapidly renewable, yeah, rapidly renewable. But even when they found out, I was in the talk just a few weeks ago about this futurist who talked about Roman concrete, that apparently is stronger than the concrete that we're creating today because literally it is repairing itself. And we have still no idea how the Romans did it, but just materials that even indeed repair themselves or that can indeed have a natural flow in nature or in life because they are constantly actually modifying themselves as well to adapt.

Chris Lefteri: Yeah, but then we and I think that we should explore everything. And I think that's a fantastic avenue to explore. But it comes down to appropriateness and it comes down to this idea of which I think people are becoming more accepting of. The most important thing that we need to consider is that it has an ongoing lifespan that sure repairable or renewable or rapidly renewable growth and plants and things like that. You then have this question of, well, okay, is anybody going to reuse it? Can anybody recycle it? So I think everything has its place, but it's just fitting into the right appropriate use.

Judith van Vliet: I think also one of the most important parts is exactly what you already said. Also, to summarize a little bit, when somebody selects a material, it better be part of that bigger picture, the branding, what a company stands for, what it is exactly that they want to bring into the market. But also, once you obviously, as you said, you bring something in the market, it is a product. You have to think about this lifetime, right? Like, do you want it to disappear at a certain point or do you want it to be stuck around forever? And I think that's not a question a lot of brands, designers, actually ask themselves.

Chris Lefteri: Sure, absolutely, yes. It's like you. But it's not going to come from the designer. It's going to come from somebody very high in the organization, say, you know what? This is? How so? I don't want to see plastics coming from cactuses. I want to see plastics that are easily recyclable, widely recyclable, low embodied energy. We can recycle it. We can recycle it again and again. No, if that's the solution, I'm not suggesting that is the only thing.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, careful with that, because obviously everybody is going to be listening to this podcast and they're going to be getting back to you and they're, like you said, Cacti, we're part of the future.

Chris Lefteri: Just trying to try to very careful path so that I don't see anything, because there are so many ways that you could be proved wrong. And I think this is also a slight problem and this is something that came from a client who didn't want to embrace a particular aspect of sustainability because they felt that they would be open to criticism from some of their customers. Well, I understand that you don't want to be perceived as greenwashing, but at the end of the day, is it going to be better for you and better for the planet to do this? Because if you are fearful of doing something just because of backlash that may or may not be justified, you know, no one's going to do anything. And there's a great quote, and I don't know whether he meant it in this, but I've used it many times, and it's from a friend of mine, Ed Thomas, who used to be director of materials at Nike. And he said when he was with his team and they were coming up with ideas, he would he would he would say to the group, you know, if somebody comes up with an idea, don't kick the puppy or don't kick the kitten. One of those two. But it's like, I mean, let's let's not kick anything, right? Let's let's try, because we've got to push and just see if ten years ago, when we first, I think, really on a big scale, started to push sustainable materials, maybe 20 years ago, if I think about it, we had ignored this kind of we had decided not to use bioplastics because they can't be recycled or whatever, then I think we wouldn't have learned, right? So we have to learn. Just learn and learn quickly.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, you learn by making mistakes. And I think that is where that's actually what drives innovation, because if you're not allowed to make mistakes, no innovation will ever happen. Right?

Chris Lefteri: Yeah. Maybe you don't have to shout about it. If you're fearful of what your customers will say, just don't say anything that's true.

Judith van Vliet: To finish off our conversation, can you pick your favorite material and tell us its story?

Chris Lefteri: Okay, so my first answer, which is not the answer you want to hear, but I'll tell the answer you want to hear as well. My first answer is that the material.

Judith van Vliet: Has I'm curious how you know what I want to hear, but yes, go ahead.

Chris Lefteri: Well, I have to answer the question, so I'm guessing that's what you want to hear. But the thing that I'm going to say before I answer the question is that there is no favorite material because the material has no value unless you've done something with it. And it is the use of a material that I feel more strongly about. There was a material. So I'll give you some answers to that question, but it is more about what you do with the material than it is the material. There was a material that I came across last week which was a cork, where cork have been ground down into a dust. So cork is there's lots of cork based stuff and then they produce fabrics. And I was fascinated because you have this vision of cork as a solid material, as you do with many materials that then become transformed into a fabric that has no resemblance to cork. Right. I mean, I couldn't pick it up and say this was cork. That was something that I found particularly interesting. In terms of the favorite material connected to a product historically, I would say that Tupperware and polyethylene, because I think in terms of a material story, it is a phenomenal success. And it says so much about some of the things we've been talking about that it needed a story to be told by people interacting with each other through the tough wet party. It didn't work as a story on a shelf. No one understood what it did. It was a sensory product and material in the sense that it wasn't just that it had this spongy quality. Not many people know this about Tupperware, but the unique thing about it is that by pushing the lid down, you expel the air and that's what keeps food fresh. When you open the lid, it lets in this air there was a sound they called the Tupperware burp. And I love that there is this connection between a material and sound. And then you've got that lovely translucent, milky, translucent see of those pastel colors as well. So that on a historical level, I think is great. Maybe my favorite use in a contemporary of material was called Paper Vows by Torofu Architects. And you can buy them. They come in an envelope flat. They're about sort of 20, 30. It's this die cut piece of paper, regular paper that you use as a bar. So you get it as a flat in an envelope, and you expand it. You put it out from the center, and it becomes this structure, this mesh like structure that completely redefines what paper is, and it becomes something that is animated. It bounces. They print color on one side, a different color on the other. So it has this kind of dual color. You can push it together, and it becomes springy. So through that process of material, it becomes something completely different. And I found that so inspiring. I've given you three different types of answers to your question.

Judith van Vliet: Thank you. Thank you so much. I actually have one, and it was what's?

Chris Lefteri: Yours?

Judith van Vliet: No, I have a paper boss. Indeed. When I got one. Indeed. It surprised me. And I think that's the fun thing, right? When you are being given something and it's absolutely not what you expected it to be. And exactly through its color, structure, haptic everything. And I think that's where the beauty lays in design and material and, of course, color.

Chris Lefteri: But what's your favorite material?

Judith van Vliet: My favorite material? I think definitely well, it depends whether it's the material I work with or whether it's a material that I fancy. I actually like anything that's I loved sand as a girl. Sand. Just literally sand. And I think that's still something. When I have my feet in the sand on the beach, I'm the happiest person on Earth. That's literally something that emotionally is I think a lot of people have this probably what I enjoyed very much for ten years to do color for for Master Batches. So for plastic, it's something that it taught me a lot about plastic, sustainability, a lot of topics. Right now, I'm very interested in colouring foods. That's something that's a new journey for me. And that's something that's completely different with natural food pigments. So that no synthetic colorants, but that's something that intrigues me as well, where color how color plays with, indeed, the smell, obviously, but then also haptic touch. It's the entire experience when you're eating, right?

Chris Lefteri: Yes.

Judith van Vliet: So that's something that intrigues me a lot now.

Chris Lefteri: Yes. And I love the connection between food and materials if we can create that same evocative quality that makes you want to eat or cook.

Judith van Vliet: So I love working with chefs all around the world and talk to them about this topic.

Chris Lefteri: I've listened to your podcast with one of them.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah. With indeed, the pastry chef, the Chocolate Chef. That was just the world opening up. Indeed. That's why it's a never ending conversation at color design, material, and applications. But it's been amazing talking to you and a lot of information, and thank you for being part of the podcast.

Chris Lefteri: My pleasure, Judith. Thanks.

Judith van Vliet: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Lefteri. Now, if you have not done yet. Please go to Spotify or Apple podcast or wherever you're listening to the Color Authority. Start following us and rates and review the show. I would be so thankful for that. Now, the next episode is coming out in the next month of March, and it's going to be with an amazingly wonderful, colorful Italian designer. So stay tuned and have a colorful rest of your day.