New design practices are increasingly inspired by living beings: by choosing natural, renewable and local resources, designers and scientists are inventing new materials from food waste. Like Ateliers LUMA in Arles, they are envisioning local solutions that are fueling an ecological, economic and social transformation.
Violaine BuetFounder - La manufacture des algues
Caroline BiancoAssociate Director - Atelier LUMA
Samy RioDesigner
Clara Le FortJournalist
Founder - La manufacture des algues
Violaine Buet studied humanities (Educational science and Sign language) after obtaining her diploma in industrial design at ENSCI. She spent seven years in Southern India, where her attraction to textile design grew and developed. She trained in block-print techniques and worked with a traditional, local workshop for two years, savoring alternating hierarchies, since she was alternately an apprentice and a design director. From these dialogues with Indian artists, she retained one certitude: that the beauty of a piece or a material is intrinsically linked to the soundness of the connections between all the hands that made it. She undertook her algae-tinged research at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in 2016 (continuing education in “textile design and materials”). When she returned to her native Brittany, she founded her creative research and development studio for macro-algae and surrounded herself with a network of experts, researchers and artisans, whom she works with depending on specific project needs.
Associate Director - Atelier LUMA
A graduate of ENSCI in industrial design, and trained at IDEO, Caroline Bianco possesses a decade of experience in applied research and in enterprise consulting for major corporate groups such as Renaud, BNP Paribas, Aon and Airbus…She specializes in the implementation of research and development strategies and industrial processes. She joined Atelier LUMA in 2017, where she is now Associate Director. Within this firm, she heads up the entire research team and projects led in collaboration with various scientific, institutional and commercial partners.
Designer
Samy Rio is a designer based in Arles. He studied woodworking for four years before moving on to the Ecole nationale supérieure de creation industrielle (ENSCI) in Paris, where he studied industrial design for five years. These two courses of study allowed him to work with both industry and fine craft, practices that he sees as complementary and interdependent. He received his diploma from ENSCI Les Ateliers in October 2014, with honors, due to his research project on the industrialization of bamboo tubing. In July 2015, he won the Design Parade Grand Prix at Villa Noailles with this same project. Since then, he has had several residences, notably at the Cirva in Marseille, at the Cité de la Céramique in Sèvres, at the NTCRI in Taiwan and at Atelier Luma. In 2020, he was selected as a curator and installation designer for the 1st-ever design exhibition at the Louvre Lens. Through these different residences built around glass, ceramics, wood and bamboo, he has kept exploring the interactions between craftsmanship and industry, and traditions and new tools, in order to question both the way we produce objects and the objects themselves.
Journalist
A writer for French and international publications (Les Echos WE, Le Point, ELLE, ELLE DECO, Bllnr), Clara Le Fort deals with subjects related to luxury, innovation and sustainable development. She also works with brands on strategic matters, as a design director. In addition, she has authored five books, published by Gestalten, and has written the Louis Vuitton City Guide for Sydney, Istanbul, Copenhagen and Arles.