For Paris Design Week, four Latvian designers and artists partnered with Kalve Coffee to explore the café as a small-scale material ecosystem, where the by-products of everyday consumption become the starting point for new forms of production. Three substances generated through its daily operation — used coffee grounds, dirty water and excess foamed milk — move through treatment and production stages, connected in a continuous chain of material experiments.



The café becomes both the source and the laboratory. The project brings together bio design and circular economy principles through a chain of interconnected processes, in which the output of one experiment becomes the input for the next.



First stage begins with a water filtration system by Mārtiņš Mežulis. Discarded coffee grounds, transformed through pyrolysis into biochar together with CharcoTec and subsequently treated with steam with the help of Yang Liu from Eindhoven University of Technology, become activated carbon and are used for experimenting with filtering the dirty water collected in the excess water reservoir of a coffee machine. 



Afterwards, part of the filtered water is used by the installation’s next stage, Milk Glue by Katrīna Tīna Smilga. Leftover foamed milk is heated and acidified, separating it into curds and water. The curds are collected, dried and milled into a fine powder, creating a new material, which can mimic qualities of a gluelike substance.



Līva Sakārne, in her part of the installation, combines used, dried coffee grounds, the milk glue and a small amount of previously filtered water to form a moldable material. Pressed into wooden molds, the mixture becomes takeaway and drink-in coffee trays, with organic shapes inspired by spilled liquid. During the exhibition, some of these trays become part of Kalve Coffee’s everyday service, replacing the conventional trays used by customers and allowing the material experiment to function directly within the café.



The chain also takes a sculptural form. Dirty water is combined with glycerin and resin to create interior elements that appear to freeze the movement of water in time. Paula Punkstiņa’s amber-colored surfaces transform another by-product of the café into part of the spatial environment.



Rather than presenting these as separate material experiments, Found Associations makes the connections between them central to the project. Each process feeds the next, creating a system in which materials continuously change function and form. Low-tech techniques sit alongside laboratory-based methods, revealing different scales of what a circular café could become.



The exhibition’s title, Found Associations, refers to the necessity of creating new interpretations when working with excess materials, not only by focusing on their visual and sensorial appearance, but also by questioning the language traditionally used around discarded materials, looking beyond the familiar category of “waste” to reveal further possibilities.



Found Associations ultimately proposes the café as an experimental model of the circular economy: a place where consumption is directly connected to production, and where one process can generate the conditions for another. Coffee grounds become a filter, milk becomes an adhesive, water becomes a spatial material — and the café itself becomes a laboratory for finding new associations.