Christien Meindertsma explores the life of products and raw materials. Her signature approach has led to a shift towards more sustainable design practices. Her approach is characterised by its rigour, craftsmanship, and an unparalleled re-appreciation of the value that local production and underexplored resources hold for a circular economy. Blending craft and technological innovation while offering exhaustive documentation that revalues material streams, Christien dives into a deeper understanding of the materials and products surrounding us. By doing so, she encourages awareness, thought, and discussion and reveals processes that have become abstract. Her research into raw materials and everyday products reveals a network between source and consumer that has become increasingly invisible.

Since graduating in 2003 from Design Academy Eindhoven, Christien Meindertsma has continued to develop her unique approach to material research and design. In some instances, the result of her projects may be the record of a process itself, like PIG 05049, which documented all the products made from a single pig. Item by item, the research highlights the material possibilities and applications for the different properties that characterise each byproduct, revaluing it as a material stream. In others, her investigations lead to commercial products. Works such as the Flax Project (and its numerous offshoots) are also typical of her approach: Meindertsma purchased an entire harvest of a Dutch flax farmer to explore how flax products might stay more locally produced. FLOCKS Wobot works as a 3D printer using wool, allowing for discarded local European wool to be industrially processed into three-dimensional structure, without needing additional material byproducts or water. Meindertsma’s research into the undervalued quality of local wool and how to repurpose it continues, as she successfully demonstrated with De Zachte Stad.

christienmeindertsma.com