Lamp made out of eggshells cracks prestigious furniture award

Joanne Odisho, a Melbourne furniture designer collects thousands of discarded eggshells from local cafes. Then she sterilises them, dries them and puts them through a Nutribullet.

These are the first steps in creating the novel material Odisho uses to make her Mod-u lamps, a collection of configurable Jenga-esque lighting pieces, which recently won her the coveted Australian Furniture Design award, one of the country’s richest design awards.

Once crushed to a fine powder, the eggshells are combined with a biopolymer. Photograph: Joanne Odisho

Odisho first explored the idea during a school assignment while studying furniture design at RMIT in 2022, when she was charged with utilising food waste in a product. Inspired by resources from Materiom, an organisation dedicated to innovations in nature-based materials, she experimented with coffee grounds “but they developed mould”, before landing on the unlikely flexibility and fortitude of eggshells.

After being crushed to a fine powder, the shells are combined with a biopolymer to create a substance “about the consistency of wet sand” which is then poured into molds and left to dry naturally “for about a week”. She’d rather keep the specifics of the setting agent under wraps to avoid copycats, but says it’s a household product that is totally biodegradable. Odisho is unsure of the science behind why her composite works but the substance can be made in a home kitchen, is self curing and requires no firing process.

The resulting material is cheap, durable, compostable and, since she doesn’t add any dyes, showcases the natural palette of a carton of eggs.

The lamps themselves are made up of dozens of re-arrangeable blocks molded from the eggshell composite, which Odisho describes as rock-like in its durability once dried. Those can be “moved, rotated and alternated to create your desired arrangement”, she says.

Composite image of various Mod-u configurations. Photograph: Joanne Odisho

Stylecraft, a furniture company founded in Melbourne in 1953, has spearheaded the biannual Furniture Design award since 2015. The last four iterations of the prize have been presented in conjunction with the National Gallery of Victoria as part of Melbourne Design Week. Winners receive a cash prize of $20,000 as well as the opportunity to collaborate with StyleCraft on taking a new design to commercial production and then to market.

Tony Russell, the company’s brand director has sat on the prize’s jury since its inception. He estimates he’s considered over 500 submissions during that time. This year the theme “living well, living small” challenged designers to conceive pieces that “enhance comfort, functionality, and wellbeing within compact spaces.”

Russell was intrigued by Odisho’s use of eggshells, which he hadn’t encountered before, but says it was the product’s versatility that secured his vote. “It can be configured into a table lamp, a floor lamp or a feature piece.”

“The lamps’ architectural form and how tactile it is,” also won over the judges. “It’s a furniture piece that you want to engage with,” Russell said.

Odisho will now work with Stylecraft on developing and manufacturing a new design. She isn’t sure what that will be. “It might be a variation on these lamps, but I’m very interested in exploring soft furnishings, like modular sofas, too,” she said.