My raggedy bear

Reducing textile waste with teddy bears.

Originally this idea was done for an RSA submission for their ‘fair play’ brief. The brief specified that I had to ‘design or re-design a consumer toy and its product packaging to eliminate waste, using circular design principles’. This lead me to look into recycling fabric through toy making.

For this I looked into the traditional teddy bear and designed a behaviour trait and simplified means that encouraged parents to connect with their children through personalisation and construction of their own ‘raggedy bear’. These bear prototypes are created out of recycled/scrap fabric with the intent to reduce textile waste that would otherwise be sitting in landfills.

Taking a pre-existing teddy bear pattern, I then colour coded the type of stitches to simplify the construction of these prototypes, this was done to make the bears for beginners of all ages.

The instructions to make, the teddy bear pattern and designed behaviour trait are disguised as a 'suggestion' to make more out of old fabrics from home. All this information was incorporated into the design of the packaging, this itself was proposed to be printed on GF Smith’s ‘cup paper’ which is made out of recycled paper cups, making all the components of my design incorporate circular design principles.