GREENHOUSE - Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair 2016

GREENHOUSE

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Greenhouse, the section for young designers and design schools at Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair. The arena where new design talents get a chance to show their prototypes and meet manufacturers from the furniture industry.

I always find this section of the fair the most interesting and inspireing one, and not surprisingly the Greenhouse is where focus on sustainalility and green design is most prominent at the fair.

ANALOGUE WAYS

The distance between man and nature has never been greater than today. Our lifestyle is built on linear systems and non-renewable energy sources and we expect new technolgy to solve the environmental challenges the world is facing.  But maybe the answer to future environmental challenges is found in past generations solutions rather than in new technology? Should we look backward as well as to the future?

This was part of the script for the students from Lund University, School of Industrial Design, LTH, for the fairs exhibition.  Inspired by past days traditional production methods the twelve student projects exhibited at the fair re-interpreded traditional analogue production methods and products. With focus on traditional and sustainable values they visualize a future were the producers take into account its local surroundings and base their production on local materials and sustainable resources.

Among these objects were GR?NT by Agnes Sj?berg.  GR?NT are glass containters to stores vegetables as the aesthetic plants they are ¨C worthy of display. Vegetables stored in plastic bags at the bottom of the refigerator are easily forgotten. They tend to overripe and rotten before we remember them, making vegetables the largest category of houshold food wast. GR?NT is desinged to display the vegetables, making us as consumers more aware of our consumption and behaviour around food, thus reducing household waste.

NATURALIST.TODAY

At the stand Natrualist.Today, a collaboration of 15 independent young Russian designers, exhibited interior objects with focus on bringing

communication with nature into  the daily life of city dwellers.  It inlcuded small furniture  and interior objects of traditional and natural material such as birch bark, wicker and ceramics, representing nature in a contemporary way.  Among the 20 or so diverse objects exhibited on their stand there were storage boxes in birch bark inspired by Siberian traditional craft, and a combined plant holder and bird feeder with an integrated speaker enhancing the sound of songs of the pleased birds.

These are just a small selection of the many inovating and inpireing objects by young talented designers with focus on green design and sustainability displayed in the 2016 Greenhouse. Designers and objects which in the future may find its way in to the main fair and eventually to the consumers.