Future Protein Print

Shellfish farming offers a sustainable source of protein to meet the increasing demand for sustainable food production as the global population grows. However, growing facilities can become "automated exclusion zones," so it is essential to design access for people to live around and visit. We aim to explore how we can use water surfaces to create communities, as is done in various countries such as India and Thailand. We want to combine social aspects with sustainable food production to prevent the exclusion of people from these facilities. Switching to sustainable and transparent protein-based food production like shellfish farming is a possible solution to combat the exploitative and destructive industrial meat and dairy farming practices. This is because shellfish farming is a sustainable process that filters water during growth, stores CO2 and has the potential for shell-based waste to be used for biomaterials production. When we started researching shellfish and algae production, we didn’t know that there is a vast difference compared to commercial fish farming including: diseases, pollution and antibiotic use.  Design process Based on our previous research and initial vision, we wrote an input for three image descriptions to ChatGPT, asking it to improve our inputs. We pasted these descriptions in Midjourney and generated a set of initial images. Afterwards, we fed them back to get software descriptions of the pictures and edited our text input a few times. As a result, we produced a large number of visuals with different aesthetics and levels of detail. We chose a conceptual set conveyed with a sense of "visual dyslexia" and poetic experience rather than realistic renderings. We wanted to get the feeling of a new community lifestyle rather than the final design.