Founder, Aplat Inc.; Chair of Industrial Design & Furniture Design, California College of the Arts
Shujan Bertrand is the founder of Aplat, a zero-waste culinary design company inspired by the art of origami and the slow food movement. With a passion for sustainable design, she merges creativity with simplicity to create products that promote slow living and reduce waste. Shu has worked in the tech and innovation industries across Paris, Milan, Seoul, and the Bay Area, leading creative teams to develop transformative products.
Shu also leads the Industrial Design and Furniture Program at California College of the Arts, where she’s shaping the next generation of designers. Her approach focuses on life-centered, circular design, driving innovation and sustainability in both education and practice. Shu’s leadership transforms design education, empowering students to design a future that is regenerative, creating sustainable products that harmonize with nature and enhance the health of both people and the planet.
Circular Design Becomes Transformative, Regenerative, Restorative
Circular Design is our profession’s growth opportunity to transform the circular economy and tackle climate change simultaneously. Industrial design’s contribution—breakthrough products, packaging, and design practices—impacts lives and livelihoods worldwide across consumer, commercial, and industrial sectors. Given this scale and global reach, every material selection, production method, and transportation decision we make forms a critical part of a holistic circular system. As a result, our roles are influential, and our work is consequential because it leaves a lasting imprint on the environment everywhere.
Guiding principles, common goals, and accountability are needed to ensure our approach is sustainable and scalable for both people and the planet. To that end, UN Sustainable Development Goal #9 focuses on building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation. It’s a goal around which we can all unite and join with others to broaden its inclusivity.
By adopting these practices, we can drive Circular Design further to create a future filled with the transformative, sustainable solutions that our planet urgently needs.
The audience will learn:
Known for her contributions to the advancement of women in industrial design and sustainable design, Shujan Bertrand, IDSA has used her unique skills for immense social good this year. She and her San Francisco-based design studio Aplat, which manufactures zero-waste products, quickly pivoted to producing PPE when the novel coronavirus began spreading worldwide in early 2020.
“In early March, before California’s shutdown, I was watching Europe and Asia struggle through the early stages of the pandemic,” Shujan recalls. “I paid close attention to the shortage and increasing demand for protective face masks and knew that I had to do something to help. Intuitively I began to prototype and refine over 50 designs and landed on the best mask design that fit over my family’s various face shapes and sizes, and for a sister who is a MD surgeon, wanting this design to support her needs first. With my factory across the street from the studio, in just two weeks, I was able to produce 10,000 masks to donate nationwide, to hospitals and essential healthcare workers.”
Aplat has since donated over 20,000 masks to frontline workers, and the free Aplat mask pattern has been downloaded over one million times across the world. “I’ve received letters and images from people who have made their own Aplat mask at home, connecting me to others during challenging and uncertain times,” Shujan says. The Aplat origami mask design also made the cover of INNOVATION magazine “Urgent Design” Summer 2020 issue, accompanied by Shujan’s article “Origami to the Rescue.”
Staying in business and making it through 2020 has been an accomplishment in and of itself for Shujan and her team at Aplat; although, much to their surprise, Aplat’s masks and matching culinary totes have now become the company’s best-selling products. “The intention was to manufacture masks as a temporary solution to serve the shortage and for donation only,” Shujan says, “but today we continue to provide Aplat origami masks in seven different colors. We use the same sustainability zero-waste designs and origami principles applied in the rest of our collection in our masks. All of our products are compostable and biodegradable at the end of their lifecycle.”
Shujan adds that her key motivation to get through this year has been her family and friends. “Our circle is small but strong,” she says. “Friendship is rooted in my design community, all of which are IDSA members or have served on the IDEA jury with me these past few years.” She also continues to be inspired by authenticity, zero-waste living, gardening, and nature.
Currently, she’s developing her home property into an outdoor social space with an edible garden, researching partnerships with emerging sustainable fiber companies to work into Aplat’s circular economy business model, and exploring how to continue to fold origami designs into the Aplat collection. “Every product we make scales into the family of golden ratios,” Shujan says. “In the future, we hope to publish an ‘Aplat Origami Design’ book filled with endless ideas of how to transform a single sheet into new forms.”
