Inhoudsopgave van a Table 2023 - ELLE Decoration

Plastic from the HIMALAYAS WORKING TOGETHER WITH A NEPALESE NON-PROFIT ASSOCIATION, DUTCH SOCIAL DESIGN STUDIO SUPER LOCAL IS REMOVING, PROCESSING, AND TRANSFORMING WASTE FROM ONE OF THE HARDEST-TO-REACH REGIONS IN THE WORLD. HOW? BY USING LOCAL FACILITIES,OPEN-SOURCE TECHNOLOGY, AND HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY. Hi Dirk, what are you working on now? After planning a big move for about four years, we finally bought our new production premises next door. It’s been a long time coming and the timing is ripe because our current location is too small. We’re moving to an old warehouse that was previously used to store ammunition, so it’s a very solid building with floors that boast a high bearing capacity. That’s crucial for a production facility like ours because we make everything in-house and our machines are very…

Hi Simone, what are you working on at the moment? Right now, I’m in Japan for an artist-in-residence programme. For the past three months, I’ve been learning about ceramics from skilled artisans in Arita, a town famous for its long pottery tradition. I’ve been experimenting with leftover ceramics: my idea is to cover them with a glaze that hides their imperfections. I’m not sure what’ll come out of it yet, but the process has been very insightful. You’re not just a textile designer, then? Textiles is how I started – my mother was a seamstress, so it’s in my DNA. When I was 14, my parents took me to see an exhibition of the work of fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, whom I still admire greatly. I remember just being in…

Could you describe Tarkett’s global approach? We strongly believe that we need to be a leader when it comes to rewriting the rules and helping change our mindset from producing more to producing better instead. We have a responsibility to do more with less by using fewer resources. It’s true we are global, but we act local. How are you putting this into action? At Desso, our carpet division, our work is supported by three pillars. The first is design, which is really at the core. When we design, we start at the endpoint as we need to know that we can get the product back once it’s lived its life, which is part of the cradle-to-cradle principle we follow. We design each product to be functional and aesthetic but…

Industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s design philosophy, laid out in his 1951 memoir, amounted to four words: ‘Most advanced, yet acceptable’. Known as the MAYA principle, it was his belief that the future must be introduced gradually. ‘The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm,’ he wrote. Stray too far from the familiar and you risk mass rejection. In 2023 terms? Avoid the dreaded ick. Every material designer must carefully tread this tightrope – made only narrower by our resistance to certain raw resources. ‘It’s quite tricky,’ says Simone de Waart, who uses the principle in her work as founder of Material Sense, an…

You are known for incorporating sustainability into your design practice and pushing brands to be greener. How do you see your responsibilities as a designer? I feel I have a clear and urgent duty to fully embrace sustainability. It is no longer enough to focus on how things look and function; it’s also about reducing waste and preserving resources. We should consider the entire life cycle and the broader societal effects of the new materials and objects we put out there, but I think the design community has yet to fully accept this truth. It’s essential for manufacturers to take on significant responsibilities as well, including producing items in an environmentally responsible way, carefully selecting materials with lower ecological impacts, striving for innovation that lessens environmental harm, being transparent about…

Since its launch in 2019, Material Matters with Grant Gibson has garnered over 460,000 downloads from across the globe. And with a roster of guests including Yinka Ilori, Doshi Levien and Edmund de Waal, as well as emerging talents such as bone artist Emma Witter and Alice Potts, a designer who works with human sweat, it’s easy to understand why. ’When I started, there were only a handful of UK-based design podcasts,’ says Gibson, a design writer and former magazine editor for titles like Blueprint and FX. ’Materials were a thread that allowed me to cross disciplines from art and design to engineering, science and craft.’ Delving into the relationship between guests and their chosen material, the award-winning podcast discovers how it subsequently shaped their lives and careers. Such is…

Regenerative materials and design have been at the heart of our thinking and process at FranklinTill for over a decade. Materials are the building blocks of design but, taking a broader perspective, we’ve lost sight of where those materials come from and how we harvest and use them – what once seemed infinitely abundant has been revealed to be anything but. That’s because we exist in a ‘take, make, discard’ system that, until now, has relied on natural materials that we harvest from the Earth, transport to production centres and make into products to be shipped around the world. We enjoy those products briefly, then discard them, losing the original raw materials to landfill, burning them, or abandoning them in the environment or the ocean. This linear process is causing…

Denim is one of the world’s most ubiquitous materials. Durable, versatile and widely loved, this cotton twill-weave textile is best known for its number one application: blue jeans. More than 4.5 billion pairs are sold each year, according to a study by Maersk. Modern jeans are a far cry from the utilitarian basics worn as workwear by labourers two centuries ago, yet looking at denim’s origins can help unlock its potential as a building block for sustainable interiors. Considering its production, which is highly resource-intensive and prone to the release of toxic chemicals, innovations in denim’s reuse beyond fashion are urgently needed. Couple that with the fact that 92 million tons of textile waste are generated worldwide every year, and it’s clear that opportunities exist for designers to do more…

We’re a weird bunch, us humans. As much as we like to claim we don’t care what other people think of us, many of our behaviours are focused solely on showing others we are cool, worthwhile or simply decent. And that’s exactly why this project by Dutch social-design studio Super Local is such a success. World’s highest rubbish dump You’ve probably seen photos of the waste left on Mount Everest. With more visitors wanting to climb the highest peak in the world every year, the area has grown increasingly polluted. But waste on Everest is just the tip of the iceberg – excuse the pun. Although only around 600 advanced climbers summit the 8,849-metre-high peak every year, the bulk of the total 30,000 travellers that visit Sagarmatha National Park stay…

Berlin-based designers Marie Jeschke and Anja Langer use waste from the German glass industry and their own cast stone formulation to create what they call ‘glass paintings’. These surfaces, which have interesting compositions of shards in all shapes and sizes, can be turned into tabletops or decorative sculptures. basisrho.com Polish-born designer Justyna Poplawska has created a new material using recycled glass, bio-resin and colour pigments. From her Copenhagen studio, she uses the pulverised glass she collects from local factories to create interesting, colourful surfaces with subtle, shiny particles. justynapoplawska.com When making handblown glass pieces, up to a third of all the material is discarded. Czech glass light manufacturer Brokis is now turning those leftovers into a new, colourful material for architecture and interior design. Collaborating with Janštejn Glassworks, they built…

EXPERIMENTAL JOURNEY’ ‘You can’t see us, but we flourish all around you.’ It’s the start of a monologue narrated by actor Brie Larson, opening the documentary Fantastic Fungi. The film does a great job of explaining how omnipresent fungi are in our world; at one point, Professor Suzanne Simard explains how ‘under every footstep you take, there are 300 miles of fungi’. The documentary was released in 2019 but it wasn’t until a year later, at the height of the pandemic, that it found a new and much larger audience on Netflix. Director Louie Schwartzberg told Variety magazine he attributed this renewed popularity to the film‘s message, which he said is in sync with what the world needs. ‘The answer is living in harmony with nature. The pandemic is just…

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the mighty fire-bringer who taught humankind how to wield the wild essence of nature. So it is a fitting moniker for Prometheus Materials, a Colorado startup that may be close to tackling one of our most pressing climate challenges: the grey plague of concrete. If it were a country, concrete would rank third in emissions behind China and the United States, thanks to a potent mix of intensive production and utter ubiquity. Prometheus Materials has found an answer in microalgae, which will grow a bio-cement that reproduces itself like coral when seawater, sunlight and CO2 are added. Unlike traditional Portland cement, formed under fierce heat of around 1,450°C, it can be produced at ambient temperatures with near zero carbon emissions. Prometheus gave us fire –…

’A repaired object is rarely the same as a new one, and that should be celebrated. Objects can be ‘hacked‘ to give them new purpose, and repairs can be made visible to tell the story of an object. In Western cultures, repair has traditionally been hidden, but we are starting to learn from others about the love and care that can go into mending a cherished object. ’ ’There are many reasons to repair. To conserve the planet’s precious resources, because we are running out of space for all our waste, to save money, to respect the labour of the people who made the item...but also because it is joyful. It helps you develop skills and strengthens the emotional bonds you have with the things you own. ’ ’Something really…

It’s always a fun exercise to think of the city of the future. What will buildings look like, how will our houses be decorated and what materials will we use to build the physical world around us? It’s exactly those questions that London-based architecture and design innovation firm ecoLogicStudio is trying to answer in their latest book. The Italian duo propose a future in which design innovations don’t extract energy and raw resources from the planet, but grow through re-metabolisation of waste or filtration of pollution. Photosynthetic architecture, bio-digital sculptures and cyber gardens: with biodesign as a starting point for the design of cities, the future is looking bright.…

Stefanie van Keijsteren and Renee Mennen’s collections are never thought up in advance. The design studio always starts with an extensive research process; the results are created along the way. Their collaboration with Tarkett, which started almost a decade ago, is no different. ‘Back in 2014, we started thinking of a way to re-use Tarkett’s leftover Desso rugs, for instance, items from previous collections or pieces containing small imperfections. That’s when we started experimenting with adding a splash of colour to these textiles,’ says Van Keijsteren. The duo knew from the start that the colour red should be their starting point. ‘Red is a signal colour. By choosing this colour, we wanted to communicate that valuable textiles shouldn’t be wasted. Red is also notoriously difficult to use in interior design,…

A positive material future hinges on a diverse mosaic of organisations, disciplines and individuals getting to grips with a newly regenerative mindset. And corporations have a crucial role in taking on the responsible stewardship of our environment, conserving natural resources, developing circular production processes and guiding materials toward their next lives. Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, who donated his ownership of the company to a trust to ensure its profits are used to tackle climate change, is perhaps the best-known example of a founder displaying such long-term environmental vision, but increasing numbers of large-scale businesses are working towards a future in which both people and our planet can flourish. Global companies with an international presence and substantial footprints have the greatest potential for impact and the resources to invest in material…

What has wood ever done for us? It is a well-worn joke that usually refers to the startling record of the Romans, with every straight road and aqueduct a reminder of dogged human progress. This answer is even simpler: it has sheltered, defended and kept us warm for over 10,000 years. So, when it comes to sustainable materials, is it a case of not seeing the wood for the trees? ‘Nature has created a material that is strong, light and resilient,’ says Lukas Dahlén, designer and co-founder of Swedish furniture studio Ringvide. ‘The biggest problem with wood is the same as for all materials – we use it to build and construct items of low quality. What would happen if our efforts went into making long-lasting, easily repairable products instead?’…

Australian startup Great Wrap uses starch from potato peels and compostable biopolymers to create a bioplastic that offers a viable alternative to clingfilm. After using it to cover your leftover takeaway, it will break down in a landfill or home composting system within 180 days, in the same way that organic waste does. greatwrap.com.au Backed by celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher, Californiabased CruzFoam makes a Styrofoam alternative out of biomaterial such as shrimp shells. Having launched a packaging line earlier this year, it‘s now looking at replacing polystyrene peanuts and bubble wrap with a foam-like material that melts in water and is safe for animals to eat. cruzfoam.com What are mealworms good for? Turns out, a whole lot: design duo Doppelgänger had them eat polystyrene foam, which…

Koen Meerkerk and Hugo de Boon, the founders of Fruitleather Rotterdam, noticed a gap in the market by gazing at one through their windows. ‘We were studying spatial design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and from our classroom, we could see the markets in the city centre,’ says Meerkerk. ‘We saw the amount of fruit that was wasted at the end of each day and started collecting it in a shopping cart.’ Faced with overflowing trolleys of rotting fruit, they started to experiment by extracting pigments and exploring uses for its fibres. The fruits of their labour? A strip of raspberry leather, inspired by fruit rollup candy. A concept bag made of nectarine leather followed, which – although not yet viable – demonstrated the material's potential. ‘It…

This award-winning book by Richard Powers isn’t new – it was first published in 2019 – but we feel it deserves a firm recommendation in this issue. Because if there is one novel that succeeds in making you view the world with fresh eyes, it is this one. The Overstory follows various characters as they develop a frequently salient relationship with nature, and with trees in particular. It is, however, these mighty wild things that become, slowly but surely, the real focus of the book. Powers achieves this by describing the often heartbreaking events in the lives of his human cast at breakneck speed, whereas the life of the forest is conveyed in magnificent detail. And as the story shifts away from a human-centric narrative, time seems to take on…