Hemp Grounds: An Installation on the Power of Hemp

The oldest design festival of its kind in the country, DesignPhiladelphia, highlights the work of thousands of local designers, architects, and creative professionals to demonstrate Philadelphia’s reemergence as a 21st-century city shaped by thoughtful design, collaborative business practices, and community engagement.

This year it took place at Cherry Street pier with the prompt being materials and their innovation.

We created an interactive installation called Hemp Grounds: The Wonder Plant – a first-of-its-kind collaborative exhibit that brought together hemp influencers of Pennsylvania. It was produced in partnership with cutting edge organizations who are growing, farming and producing hemp as a sustainable substance.

Hemp Grounds is an effort to tell the story of how influential this wonder plant is to our historical and future design economy.

Learn why this plant can help reverse climate change, transition conventional farmers to organic, and become a replacement for some of the most non-biodegradable substances so that you too might ask yourself “what can I do with hemp?”

Impact

Our exhibit highlighted some of the most influential people in industrial hemp for our future built-environments and design projects by – Coexist, Hemphouseonwheels, Americhanvre, Judy Wicks, and more. Companies like Trifilon, focused on providing a more sustainable alternative to large-scale producers of plastic by using Hemp, were generous enough to let us showcase some samples of their Hemp based plastic. This was one of many donations of hemp products that were on display.

The Future

Hemp can be used in a magnitude of ways if we decide to take advantage of its benefits and help implement sustainable design practices. At the exhibit, participants answered the question “what can we do with hemp?” as an alternative material for their industries, and these were some of the brilliant answers that we found posted:

• Replace all paper with Hemp paper • Hip & hemp apartment
• Hemp clothing
• Replace plastic toothbrushes
• Hemp carpets
• Replacement plastic packaging with hemp packaging