What if something designed to be discarded could become something worth keeping?
For !SSUE’s Jelly Bean Project, that question begins with one of the most ordinary materials in everyday life: the soft-plastic grocery bag. In collaboration with Mio Miyasaka, Head of Design at .bungkus, discarded plastic is collected, cleaned, layered and transformed into a distinctive new material—one that retains traces of its former life while taking on an entirely new purpose.
Playful in colour, glossy in finish and practical by design, Jelly Bean challenges the idea that designing with waste has to look or feel like a compromise. Instead, it explores how thoughtful design can turn the overlooked into something desirable, useful and ultimately worth holding onto.
At Dia, we’re proud to present !SSUE’s thoughtful approach to design: transforming overlooked waste into playful, purposeful objects made to be valued and kept. Discover the story behind the Jelly Bean Project in Mio Miyasaka’s own words, below.
How did your collaboration with !SSUE Project begin, and what interested you about creating something specifically for the platform?
The collaboration with !SSUE Project began quite naturally, through a shared interest in material, design and the possibilities of waste.
What interested me about !SSUE was the opportunity to take that material somewhere new — to push it beyond its origins and explore what it could become as a designer bag. It was a chance to look at the material through a more design-led lens, asking how something so ordinary could be made refined, relevant and timeless.
The possibility of taking the design to New York was exciting too. It gave the project a sense of movement — taking a material and a way of thinking that began between Malaysia and Japan and bringing it into a very different design context.
What was the original brief for the Jelly Bean series, and where did you take it from there?
The brief of designing as a response to waste feels increasingly urgent. But I also wanted to bring a little sense of optimism and fun to the conversation — to suggest that everyone can participate, that small steps matter, and that the subject doesn't always have to feel so heavy.
Gloss became a way of translating that feeling. There is something playful and slightly unexpected about giving a waste material a polished, almost glamorous surface. I wanted to make a work bag that didn't feel too mundane — something practical, but with a little personality.
The colours were already there in the soft plastic. I didn't want to alter or add to them; I wanted to work with what existed and allow the material's natural palette to become part of the design. We also explored texture, layering and surface, letting the material bring its own character to the bag.
Function was equally important. The bag is designed to be large enough for an iPad and the everyday essentials, with two small pockets for quick access to the things you reach for most often. We used the same material for the bias tape and even the !SSUE label, so the details remain connected to the main body of the bag.
A YKK recycled zip completes the design. It felt important that even the smaller components could contribute to the overall thinking — a series of considered choices rather than one large gesture.
Ultimately, I wanted the bag to feel like a positive step: useful, colourful and a little bit joyful. Because responding to waste doesn't always have to mean sacrificing pleasure. Design can make the next step feel inviting.
Why did discarded soft-plastic grocery bags become the material for Jelly Bean?
A grocery bag is designed for a brief moment of use before quickly becoming something we no longer think about. But its life does not really end there. I was interested in that contradiction: something so temporary in purpose, yet so persistent as a material.
Rather than treating this as a limitation, I wanted to see it as an opportunity. What happens when we take one of the most overlooked forms of plastic and give it a completely different role.
What does the process of turning individual grocery bags into the finished material actually involve?
The bags are collected, cleaned and sorted before being processed and layered into a new sheet material.
The challenge is that the source material is never completely consistent. The bags vary in size, thickness and condition, so there is an element of unpredictability in every batch. We have to work with what the material gives us, rather than expecting it to behave like a conventional fabric.
That became part of the design process. There is precision in the making, but also room for variation. I enjoy that balance because it gives the material a more distinctive character — closer to the qualities you might find in a textile than a standard manufactured sheet.
For the Plain Colours series, we chose to work with some of the rarer colours that appeared in the collection. Rather than introducing new colours, we wanted to preserve these unexpected finds and give them a place within the design. In a way, each colour carries a small part of the material's previous life.
Is there anything about the finished material and product—e.g. its strength, texture, appearance, or behaviour—that tends to surprise people when they encounter it in person?
The surface tends to surprise people most.
It has a depth and tactility that isn't immediately apparent in photographs. You can also see the original colours within the material, but they become something quite different once they are layered together.
There is a nice tension between the material being recognisable as plastic and feeling completely unfamiliar at the same time. Most people can't quite imagine that it was originally a soft plastic bag.
Once the plastic is infused and transformed, however, its character changes completely. It becomes much more durable and waterproof, while retaining something of the original material's qualities. That transformation — from something soft and disposable into something strong and functional — is one of the most interesting aspects of the process.
At what point did the name “Jelly Bean” emerge, and what did you see in the finished material that made the name feel right?
The name came when we started looking at the finished material as a collection of colours rather than simply as plastic. There was something playful and almost nostalgic about the palette. “Jelly Bean” felt appropriate because it suggested colour, smallness and a certain sweetness, while also being slightly unexpected for a material made from grocery bags. I liked that contrast.
You speak about revealing a material rather than disguising it. Why is it important to you that someone can still recognise the ordinary plastic the bag came from?
A plastic bag is something we are trained not to notice. When we turn that material into something new, there is a temptation to make it look completely different — to hide its previous life and present it simply as a beautiful, desirable object.
I think that would miss the point.
With !ssue, we are interested in keeping a trace of where the material came from. You might still see a fragment of colour, a fold, a texture or a surface that reminds you of an ordinary plastic bag. The material doesn't become something else simply because we have given it a new form. Its previous life remains visible.
That creates an interesting tension: the object can be desirable without pretending that its material history doesn't exist.
I also think recognition changes the relationship between the person and the object. If you know that something you are holding was once a piece of disposable plastic, you begin to look at that material differently. What was previously considered worthless becomes something with value, not because we have erased its identity, but because we have revealed another possibility within it.
There is also an important contradiction here. If we make the object beautiful, we are asking people to desire it — and desire is part of the same consumer system that created so much waste in the first place. So the challenge is not simply to make sustainable products that people want to buy. The more interesting question is whether design can use desire as a way of changing perception.
Your work with .bungkus is guided by the idea of “making from waste, in order to end waste.” How did you arrive at that principle?
The idea comes from notime towaste design lab founders Jayce Izumi and Haya Ibrahim, who are the founders of the wider platform behind .bungkus. We have a very long-term vision for what this work could become. We hope that, in 50 years, we will have made real progress towards ending the enormous amount of waste we produce today.
notime towaste is a platform created to strive towards that possibility — not by suggesting that one project or one material can solve the problem, but by creating a space for designers to experiment, question and find new ways of working with what already exists.
I find that approach encouraging. Fifty years is a long horizon, and it allows us to think beyond quick solutions and short-term trends. Each project becomes a small contribution to that bigger ambition — a step towards changing how we design, make and value things.
For me, Jelly Bean is one of those steps. It is a small object, but it carries the idea that change can begin with something as ordinary as a discarded plastic bag.
What do you think the fashion industry gets wrong—or oversimplifies—when it talks about designing with waste?
Sometimes the material story becomes more important than the design itself. We become so focused on explaining where something came from that we forget to ask whether the object is actually worth keeping.
For me, designing with waste should not mean lowering the expectations of design. A product still needs to have beauty, function, character and a reason to exist. It should create desire — not because it carries a sustainability label, but because someone genuinely wants to use it, live with it and keep it.
I also think there is a danger in making sustainability into an aesthetic of its own. If a product looks “sustainable”, we can sometimes stop questioning what makes it a good design. I am more interested in when those boundaries disappear — when the material, the function and the beauty become one thing.
Perhaps the most sustainable object is not necessarily the one that talks the most about sustainability, but the one that people choose to keep.
That is what I hope to explore through my work: not simply how we can make something from what has been discarded, but how design can give it enough meaning and desirability to prevent it from being discarded again.
What do you hope someone notices when they encounter a Jelly Bean bag for the first time?
When !SSUE set out to explore how design could respond to waste, there was an interesting catch-22 at the heart of it: if we design something beautifully, we create desire — and desire can lead to more consumption. But if we stop designing for desire altogether, how do we create objects that people genuinely want to live with, and in doing so perhaps shift the way they think about what they consume?
That tension became an important part of the project for me.
I hope the first thing people notice is simply the bag — its form, colour and presence. I want the first reaction to be that it is something they would genuinely like to carry, rather than immediately seeing it as a product made from waste.
Then comes the discovery: that the object they are holding began as discarded grocery bags.
That order feels important. !SSUE gives us a platform to question not only what we make, but why we make it and what makes something worth keeping. Design has always had the power to create desire, but perhaps that desire can be used more thoughtfully.
If an object is beautiful, useful and made to last, it can encourage a different relationship with consumption — one based less on the impulse to replace and more on the desire to keep.
So the intention is not to make people consume more. It is to make them pause and reconsider what they value. If something once considered disposable can become something we choose to keep, perhaps our understanding of value can change with it.
