NeoCon-Organized Design Impact Grant Program Winners Announced
Designing a Better Chicago, a collaborative initiative organized by NeoCon, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), and the Design Museum of Chicago, has announced the winners of the 2021 Design Impact Grant Program.
The Weaving Mill is an artist-run industrial weaving operation located in Humboldt Park. Founded in 2015, their ethos remains steadfastly fixed on bringing the larger network of Chicago’s textile studios together to significantly reduce fiber waste. Through this grant, The Weaving Mill, in collaboration with Westtown Education for Textiles (W.E.F.T.), a textile education program for adults with developmental disabilities that the Mill has run since 2015, plans to build a bicycle-powered fiber shredding machine that will take fabric scraps and turn them into a disaggregated fluff that can be repurposed and made into shoppable, usable products. The plans for this machine will be free and accessible, allowing textile plants across the city to participate and repurpose their waste in-house.