"So here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: someone made a USB drive out of mushrooms. Well, technically mycelium, the sprawling fungal network that lives underground and occasionally pops up as the mushrooms we eat. But still. We're talking about storing your family photos, tax documents, and embarrassing early-2000s selfies inside what is essentially cultivated fungus. And somehow, this makes perfect sense."
"Enter the Soft Drive, which looks less like a tech product and more like something grown in a lab that studies alien artifacts. Designer Sree Krishna Pillarisetti built this portable drive with a shell made from mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi, combined with hemp and bioplastics from waste materials. You can see the fungal fibers through the translucent case, all wispy and organic, protecting the electronics inside. It's strange and beautiful and deliberately so."
"The translucent casing shows off the wispy, organic texture of mycelium mixed with hemp, wrapped around a standard memory card and heat sink. There's a woven lanyard attached like it's a charm you'd wear. It holds 8GB, which sounds quaint until you realize that's exactly the point. This isn't about competing with cloud storage. It's about asking why we ever thought it was a good idea to hand over our entire digital lives to massive, energy-guzzling server farms we'll never see or control."
The Soft Drive is a portable USB whose shell is grown from mycelium combined with hemp and recycled bioplastics. The translucent casing reveals fungal fibers protecting a standard memory card and heat sink, with a woven lanyard attached. The device holds 8GB and emphasizes physical, local storage rather than competing with cloud providers. The project critiques reliance on large, energy-intensive server farms and proposes waste-stream materials as viable design resources. The Soft Drive originated as an MFA thesis by Sree Krishna Pillarisetti at Parsons and aims to make data feel tangible and personally controlled.
Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News
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