Amsterdam-based Studio Drift has created an installation of 3,000 blue blocks, which each represent the plastic used to make an individual supermarket bag, at the Van Abbemuseum for Dutch Design Week.
Materialism: The bag project is an installation on display in the Eye, a semicircular, outdoor gallery-space paved with gravel, and visible from the lower-ground floor of the Eindhoven museum.

It consists of 3,000 blue plastic blocks that were placed on the ground by volunteers, a few centimetres apart, to form a sea of blue cuboids.
Studio Drift founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta also participated in placing the blocks, in a performance piece that took place last Sunday.
Each block represents the exact quantity of plastic used to make a shopping bag for Albert Heijn, the iconic Dutch supermarket. Together the assembled blocks create a "three-dimensional index of consumption".
As they have throughout the Materialism series, the studio makes manifest in physical form the amount of a given material that makes up an everyday object.
By doing so, they aim to draw attention to the resources required to make items that we take for granted.
"We are all becoming more aware of the amount of plastic we use. But usually people only hear the hard data," the studio explained. "We want people to also physically feel the amount of materials we use."

Behind the grid of blocks, a curved screen shows sixteen simultaneous films that depict every custome...