Mix and heat cornflour, water, vinegar and glycerine. You now have a hard-setting material from which you can construct anything from lampshades to wallets to bags. This is bioplastic: very much like regular plastic, but made in the kitchen and less likely to remain in garbage dumps for millennia.

The Open Design City, in the back-room of the Betahaus office space at Moritzplatz, is somewhere they’re getting serious about bioplastic. Or seriously playful, at least: after attending a practical session, I can testify that the entire experience is still full of playful creaivity, like the Platonic ideal of primary-school science experiments.

The bioplastic pioneers are impressively idealistic about turning this enjoyable goop into a fundamental material for a decentralised, post-oil culture of open-source design:

We have a dream. A dream where everyone can manufacture, repair, create and build products in their own home. Where everybody has control over the design, and the ability to personalise the products they build. We believe that these products should be environmentally friendly, biodegradable and sustainable and accessible in every meaning of the word.

They have an open session every Monday evening, and other events fairly frequently. More here