Eco-renaissance – As we’ve all become more conscious of our planet, a product’s life cycle, and our role in the process, the design world has unavoidably shifted toward sustainable production and design. We could say that we’re in the midst of an eco-renaissance, with increased supply chain transparency as well as local and ethical sourcing. Thus, it brings us the increased popularity in the use of upcycled parts and natural materials.
High-concept furniture designers, in particular, are getting in on the act, inventing new ways to create products that are not only good for the environment but also look great. Upcycling ocean plastic and rethinking post-consumer waste are two of the most popular ways that these innovative thinkers are embracing sustainability and enabling a more circular economy. Unfortunately, the majority of these pieces are currently made to order and require a significant investment.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to live in a world where responsive design is the norm rather than the exception. The following are companies and their products that are taking upcycling to the next level.
Each oak barrel tells its own story where it is handmade and refined in the best wineries to perfection. The design breathes new life into age-old oak barrels. They are carefully prepared and processed into unique barrels, tables, and wooden works in expert hands. We combine Swiss craftsmanship with modern design and sustainable upcycling. Each piece of furniture gets its own personality and becomes a unique piece handcrafted to our customer’s wishes.
The Maximus is aesthetically elegant, where the dining table has symmetrically arranged barrel staves and is framed in solid oak. With its striking feature, it can easily fill every dining room with true elegance.
Maximus is made from barrel staves of 3 used red wine burgundy barrels from the regional winery Davaz in Graubünden, Switzerland. The barrel staves are framed in solid Swiss oak wood. The spaces between are filled with epoxy resin in black, and the table legs, modeled on the shape of the barrel stave, are handmade of solid steel. The entire dining table is designed and handcrafted in Switzerland.
Old oak barrels have great potential for furniture design. Their shape and design radiate something venerable that should be preserved. For us, every barrel is full of possibilities and inspiration. It offers room forever new creations and ideas. Together with high-quality solid wood, the barrel becomes an innovative combination of classic craftsmanship and modern design. The results are works which we always develop in close collaboration with our customers.
Prize: Winner in Dining Table
Company/Firm: Fasswerk Hämmerle
Designer: Remo Hämmerle
Location: Blumenfeldstrasse 22, 9403 Goldach, Switzerland
Borne from the dreams and needs as designers aspire to make the world a better place. There is an urgent need to reduce the burden on our home planet to keep the Earth clean and green for our children.
The upcycled chairs carry the new environmental philosophy. In this day and age of resource depletion, recycling and upcycling have become the norm. We discovered valuable raw materials among the industrial waste that is routinely disposed of in landfills.
These were upcycled heavy-duty cardboard rolls that were originally used to transport steel roof sheets. The rolls are given new life in Uprolls’ design and production facility, where they are transformed into chairs, poufs, tables, lamps, pet furniture, and other items. Furthermore, the fabrics used in production are sourced from waste materials from the furniture industry, from which we select high-quality textiles.
Uprolls help to save material and energy that would otherwise be used to manufacture elements for similar products. Additionally, the upcycling process lowers industrial waste disposal costs.
Prize Winner in Armchair
Company/Firm: Leonardo Disain Oü
Designer: Leonardo Meigas
Location: Tallinn, Estonia
What is the SIT Design Award?
The SIT Furniture Design Award TM was created to recognize and share the outstanding work of furniture designers and those who incorporate furniture into their projects. The creativity, innovative vision, and accessibility in the furniture design community are celebrated and widely shared around the world.
The SIT Furniture Design Award is a program of the 3C Awards, a global organization that curates and promotes design. The company exemplifies today’s diversity and innovation in Lighting Design, Furniture Design, Interior Design, and Architecture. Each brand is a global symbol of design excellence, showcasing the work of Professional and Emerging designers to a jury of over 100 experts.
Born in Perth Australia, Rob Curedale worked as a designer, director, and educator in design offices in London, Sydney, Switzerland, Portugal, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Detroit, and Hong Kong and taught at design schools in those and other places. Now the President of the Design Community College Los Angeles, Rob is sharing his passion for design and community.
Could you tell us a little about yourself and your professional journey?
I lived in Canberra as a young child as my father had gone there to manage the finances of the city. Canberra is a modernist planned city that was constructed like Brasilia as the National Capital in Australia following an international competition for urban design in the early 20th Century that was won by Walter Burley Griffin who was Frank Lloyd Wrights’s junior partner in Chicago. I didn’t know what an unusual designed environment that city was as a child because I had experienced no other place.
My father had a collection of books that included some books on anthropology and archaeology. I was fascinated by images of exotic clothing and artifacts taken in traditional societies during the early 20th century. After I studied design I saw that ethnology, anthropology, and design are closely connected expressions of human culture.
In Canberra when I was about 17 years old, I was fortunate to meet two people who had extensive international experience practicing design and architecture. They influenced me to study architecture and then design. Both of them were extraordinarily skilled at drawing.
Roger Kirk Hayes Johnson was an architect, planner, potter, painter, sculptor, writer, and educator. After architectural studies in the United Kingdom, He was flying an Avenger fighter in 1944 when he was shot down off Dieppe attacking a convoy of German E-boats. His crew did not survive and was in the water for 24 hours before being picked up by a E-boat and to Stalag Luft III in Poland where he remained a prisoner of war until 20 May 1945 when the Russians released him.
After the war, he practiced architecture and teaching in Kenya working for the great Weimer Modernist architect Ernst May, South Africa, Burma, England, and finally Australia where he was the First Assistant Commissioner of the National Capital Development Commission. Several key Canberra landmark buildings including the National Gallery of Australia and the School of Music begun construction during Johnson’s time at the commission.
The second person was Fitzpatrick an industrial designer whose career began with his work at the Danish design firm Bernadotte Bjorn run by the brother-in-law of the King of Denmark. There he designed glassware, photographic equipment, and furniture.
He worked as a professor at Art Center College of Design Pasadena for many years and he was Professor Emeritus at College for Creative Studies in Detroit after serving for six years as Chairman of Transportation Design. He worked in design consultancies and car design studios in Melbourne, UK, Denmark, Germany, and New York and taught for many years at the Rhode Island School of Design.
After four years of studying architecture and design at what is now the University of Canberra. I won a national competition for the design of a system of airport seating and moved to Sydney to work for the company Sebel that had sponsored the competition. Later I continued graduate and other studies in Australia, the US, and some classes through the Domus Academy in Milan. In London, I completed one year of a degree in illustration at Chelsea College of Art and Design.
My first job in London was working for a company owned by Jeannette Constable Maxwell. Jeannette was an associate of John Getty 1st and his grandson John Getty 3rd. I was the only designer working there and over four years and dozens of projects built a design office. I managed the design, contract manufacturing, and installation of an extensive range of urban furniture in Abu Dhabi including bus shelters, seating, signage, postboxes and other such things in a project worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The bus shelters are still in use. “The project included signage for the AbuDhabi Airport. Building a design office was a large learning curve for me as a young man.”
After four years in London, I moved back to Sydney to manage the Australian Design Awards scheme for the Design Council. Prince Philip at one time traveled to Australia each year to present Awards managed by the Design Council, the Prince Philip Prize in a nationally televised ceremony. I would organize panels each day consisting of designers, engineers, advertising and marketing experts, human factors specialists, and others and chair the panels which lasted half a day assessing each product. We would travel to regional cities once each year to give design feedback to manufacturers. Through the Design Council, I met a wide variety of designers and manufacturers such as Gordon Andrews who had worked for Olivetti in Europe designing their showroom interiors.
For four years in Sydney, I worked as a designer and project manager for a design consultancy called KWA in an old industrial building overlooking a Gothic church. There I designed a great variety of electronic equipment furniture and other products. I worked on a number of musical synthesizers for Kim Ryrie and his company called Fairlight. His synthesizers were the first that used sampling. Musicians including Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Duran Duran, John Lennon, and Peter Gabriel used Fairlight Synthesizers then because they were the most advanced available. I recall meeting Kim just after he had returned from meeting John Lennon in his apartment in New York or Steve Jobs in his office in Cupertino and he would tell me about his experiences.
I set up my own office in Balmain which I managed for ten years while completing a Masters’s degree. We employed Marc Newson’s company to design the interior of our office which we shared with a corporate graphic design company.
My team designed urban furniture for the 2000 Olympics, furniture, a great variety of electronic equipment and medical equipment, and diving equipment for the Japanese company Apollo. We designed a laptop for Canon and medical equipment that has been used in thousands of hospitals around the world. Some of our projects are now in the collection of the Powerhouse Design Museum in Sydney. I employed many great designers there including Chris Stringer. During his 22 years later at Apple Chris contributed to the design of the PowerBook, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, HomePod, USB-C. at Apple. A couple of our designers had come from Philippe Stark’s office in Paris.
Bus Shelters for Adshel and the City of Sydney developed with the Adshel team. Part of a range of street furniture developed for the city of Sydney preparing for the Sydney Olympics since then installed in other cities.
Over the years I have worked on many hundreds of projects. In these projects I was responsible for a design, initially designing, engineering and supervising manufacture myself and eventually managing design with hundreds of people collaborating on a project. Teams on the largest projects included designers, human factors specialists, color and materials specialists, packaging designers, web designers, exhibit designers, business managers, marketing teams, engineers, manufacturers, and others. On some projects, the teams were dispersed in several countries and files were moved at the end of the day to the next design offices in another time zone where it was morning so the work could continue 24 hours a day and the current iteration of the design was moving around the world with people working on it 24 hours a day.
The first project of about a dozen seating projects that I worked on at my first job, Sebel was the design of the first one-piece polypropylene chair in the world, the Sebel Integra. Polypropelene now is one of the most common materials used for chairs. At that time there had been some fiberglass and ABS chairs manufactured in Europe but those materials were unsuitable for the Australian climate where they would become brittle and shatter within six months in the desert locations.
The Integra chair is still in manufacture after several decades. The chairs have been manufactured in six countries in volumes of tens of millions and reaching greater volumes than the population of Australia at that time. It was the largest injection molding tool that had been constructed in Australia. I worked in Sydney designing high-volume lighting for the Dutch company Philips and later moved to London which was then where designers in Australia went to expand their experience and education.
I have continued to work on furniture products in every conceivable material since then. Later I was the design director of a company called DTank in LA and design manager at Haworth in Michigan then the second-largest furniture company in the world.
Office System for RTKL Los Angeles and London Offices with RTKL, and dTank teams.
After I taught at Art Center Europe in Vevey Switzerland in the final year of that institution’s life I was invited to move to Los Angeles for a position as a senior designer and design project manager at a company called Hauser which employed about 100 designers and model makers in a converted theater owned by the actor Mickey Rooney in Westlake Village.
First, I lived in a hotel. The first house I rented in LA was shared with the actor John Savage and his wife. John is known for his roles in The Deer Hunter, The Godfather, Twin peaks, and the thin Red Line. I taught at Art Center over a period of about 25 years and was the Chair of the Product Design Program at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
I had some extraordinary experiences in Detroit but I think I should not dwell too much there for sake of brevity. The program I chaired at CCS had then about 40 instructors and was the largest ID program in the Americas. I worked for a period as a manager for a Hong Kong-based design firm that designed products for airline catalogs.
I started writing books on design about 15 years ago. I had observed that few product designers write books and there is a need for reference books in design education. My contacts with the more than a million designers in the online Groups I had established allowed me to make designers aware of this resource.
I have since published about thirty books on subjects related to design, innovation, design thinking, design research, service design, product design, and design methods. They have sold and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies. Design Thinking Process and Methods manual is now in its fifth edition and is 660 pages!
You have designed over 1,000 products, experiences, and services; what are your design principles and where do you find your inspiration?
I find inspiration in people and from experiences. I am inspired by unorthodox disruptive creative people. My heroes were always people who transgressed the normal. They were disruptive. The type of people who if they are given a page with ruled lines will write or sketch sideways rather than between the lines. People like Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, Jane Goodall, Ettore Sottsass, Emmeline Pankhurst, T.E. Lawrence, and Johannes Itten. I have worked with many such people. They do not interface easily with corporations.
I am a product of the century of Modernism. I follow loosely Dieter Rams ten principles of design. There is no better summary. His view is Eurocentric.
Good design is innovative, Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is thorough down to the last detail, Good design is environmentally-friendly, Good design is as little design as possible. Making things people need is better than making people want things.
The teachers at the Bauhaus were influenced by revolutionary communist theory that wanted to overthrow design traditions to build a brave new world order that served the industrial age. I see value in traditional approaches to design as well as in modernist theory.
I think that the Japanese understood a better relationship between people and materials always reminding us that we exist with nature not dominating it. Good design can also be found in the traditional craft cultures of old civilizations such as in India, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. In these places, good design is not just as little as possible
When I was managing my own design office in Sydney I took some long breaks from design practice. One of those breaks was to work on an archaeological dig in the Jordan Eastern Black Desert at Um El Qatain with a group of archaeologists from Oxford University and I taught for a period at Art Center in Switzerland and spent some time in the Annapurna Region of the Himalayas in Nepal… I traveled down the Nile on a Felucca and through the Sinai with a Bedouin in a Jeep. I worked on archaeological digs in the Middle East and in The United States.
Stefano Marzano who once headed Philips Design in the Netherlands told this story when I studied a short course with the Domus Academy. His grandfather was a clothing designer and maker in Italy. He would first sit down with the customer and discuss their life like a psychologist or a friend before designing and making the clothes for them. Two weeks after the brief the customer would return and try on the clothes. When the customer returned his grandfather would wheel out a “magic old mirror” from a closet. Stefano noticed that the customer would always smile when they first looked into the magic mirror and saw how the clothes perfectly suited them because the grandfather understood them. Stefano saw their smile in the magic mirror while he played in feet deep cloth cuttings on the floor and for him, the smile was the essence of good design. The smile was the essence and evidence of user-centered design. Decades later that smile is still for him the best test of good design.
One of the most influential European Industrial designers of the 20th Century, Ettore Sottsass considered that the greatest design is often found not in great architectural monuments or museums but in the humblest of objects we use or encounter every day.
“I don’t understand why the President’s speech is better than love whispered in a room at night.” “When I was young, I gathered information only from fashion magazines or from very ancient, forgotten destroyed dusty civilizations never from solidity. ” At the beginning, when I was young, full of presumption, theoretical, very aggressive, I was very tied to turn of the century functionalism, to the idea of functional style. but gradually I left that behind because I found a new source of inspiration. from then on, I began to try to figure out what I could be in terms of this society, the people, the necessity which surrounded me.”-Ettore Sottsass.
Sottsass started his career in Mussolini’s Italy. Ettore Sottsass was also a friend of Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Picasso, Max Ernst, Alice Toklas, Chet Baker, Jack Kerouac, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alberto Moravia and Ernest Hemingway. Sottsass met Kerouac following his recuperation from Nephritis that he had contracted in India in 1961 Roberto Olivetti funded a treatment program for Sottsass at the Stanford Medical Center, Palo Alto, California, After months of recuperation at the Center, Sottsass met Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in San Francisco.
Concept Development for Turnstone a Steelcase company.
When did you join the Design Community College in Los Angeles as President? Can you tell us more about the programs and specialties taught?
I established DCC in 2012. DCC teaches certificate programs and individual online classes in Design Thinking, Industrial Design, Service Design, Experience Design UX, Interaction Design, Color, Business Practices, Portfolio, Human Factors, Mapping Methods, Design Methods, and Design Research to designers, engineers, and executives, and other areas.
Our students are mostly working designers, engineers, and executives who are seeking to expand their knowledge to practice design in these areas. We have presented hundreds of online and face-to-face corporate educational workshops in these areas. Most of the classes are online now because of the pandemic.
Students have come from companies such as Tesla, NASA, Pininfarina, MIT Stanford, Samsung, Logitech, Steelcase, Nike, Starbucks, and universities and government organizations. Students are able to access needed skills for design practice without enrolling in traditional degree programs. For example, one student was a biomedical engineer from Siemens in Cambridge UK who is managing industrial designers and needed to know more about industrial design. The education system in the United States is broken so we wanted to fulfill a need by providing good quality education that is relevant, affordable, and flexible for students.
We have educated about 7,500 students. Many students do several courses. We have had students from Africa access classes from cell phones. In the United States, good quality education for many people has become inaccessible due to cost. The best design schools charge Ivy League tuition.
Design Managers and Directors may need to learn new skills but they do not want to commit to a graduate degree program that will take them away from their work. A lot of the content of degree programs is not immediately useful to them. They want relevant skills that can be learned when they have time available. They want live teachers, not prerecorded classes. They want teachers with high-level teaching and design practice experience. Those are the things we deliver!
What do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities in your career now?
I am always interested in trying something new. Something that brings me to new people and new places and new ways of thinking. Because my work always involves software, I find one of the challenges is keeping up to date with software. I have done update courses for about a dozen types of software used for UX and interactive instructional design recently.
I think design education in the United States has problems as an industry and is ready for some disruption to become more flexible, relevant, and affordable. Designers need skills now that are hybrid skills to enable the design of systems of products, services, and experiences. These skills cross traditional boundaries of disciplines like graphic design, interior design, architecture, experience design and web design.
You founded and manage design Groups on LinkedIn dedicated to Design with over 1.3 million followers, what type of content are you sharing? What are your main goals?
There are 1.3 million group members in the design groups that I have established on LinkedIn. I think I have about 40,000 followers but this is increasing currently by perhaps one thousand each week. All these people share their thoughts and experiences in my groups. I established the groups when Linkedin added the group feature. That was probably now fifteen years ago. At that time design discussions were mostly national. Some designers belonged to national design institutions in their particular country.
This level of reach in social media can only be compared to the nightly viewers of media organizations like CNN and Fox news. Fox news for designers. I try to promote using this reach the greater good through design.
I understood from working as a designer in Australia, Europe, and the United States that there were then considerable differences in the practice of design in different areas of the world.
For example, I saw working then in Los Angeles that design consultancies there used design research somewhat less than design consultancies in London. One of the successes of IDEO at that time was infusing the culture of Silicon Valley with ideas of the European partners including Bill Moggridge and Tim Brown. I wanted to establish an international venue for design discussion where ideas could be shared internationally in real-time. Innovation coming through sharing different approaches and ideas. Like the coffee houses of Vienna in the 19th Century where different cultures and ideas came into collision over coffee creating innovative music and art. So, I established the first LinkedIn Groups for Design Research, Product Design, Graphic Design, Web Design, Interior Design, Service Design, design education and Architecture. Some of those groups have close to 200,000 members today. It is necessary to moderate some of the groups to allow open discussion. Ray Kinsella an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond in the field of dreams said “If you build it, they will come” and so I created the groups more than a million working designers did
I am exposed through this extraordinary number of practicing designers to a river of design every day. I am swimming in a river of ideas. I share those things that I find personally inspiring and interesting. I sometimes feel like I am exposed to more design from more places than almost anyone in the world. I share those things that I think need to be shared about new developments in all areas of design. New ideas, new fields of design, progress. I am also interested in great design from history, not just from the 20th Century. There are so many ideas that have been forgotten!
Look Seating For Haworth with Robert Leonetti and Haworth Team.
What are you working on at the moment, and do you have any upcoming projects that you’re able to tell us about?
At the moment I am working on some new books related to design. I have written and published about thirty design books in areas such as design thinking, product design, web design, service design, design research, color, and design practice. Twenty years ago, before design thinking was widely known I felt that design thinking could be valuable to people who were not trained designers to solve their problems and create solutions for example a village in Africa that lacked health facilities or clean drinking water. Traditional aid has limitations. I could see that design thinking was being taught to wealthy western students at prestigious institutions. I created a free downloadable summary of the main ideas and the process of design thinking that anyone anywhere could download for free. It has been downloaded more than 75,000 times to people in every country in the world.
I also wrote a substantial textbook of more than 600 pages on design thinking processes and methods which is used as a textbook in many colleges and universities today. I developed a more complete system of methods than had previously been used in design thinking. For example, I connected Journey and experience mapping approaches with design thinking and sprints which hadn’t previously been part of what was associated with design thinking.
I was told that Google used some of my books when they were developing sprint methodology. A few weeks ago, a manager at UNICEF thanked me for my books and work on Design Thinking.
Which advice do you give to your students, starting their career in Design?
Here are some things that have guided me:
‘Design is creativity with strategy ‘ Think about creating things that are unique and express your unique voice. What is unique about you? What do you want to be doing in five years, in ten years? How are you going to get there? Travel. One of the best design schools is an air ticket. The greatest designers in history in the US such as Eames and Lowey Mies, and I’ve all had lived in more than one culture and country. In the US if you take the names of the top 100 historical designers and architects all but a few of them lived in two or more countries. Travel puts more spanners in your design toolbox. Great writers like Falkner and Orwell drew on their life experiences in their writing. It is the same for design. Dull Hollywood soap operas may be dull because the writers lack life.
Design Is best when It Is not noticed – Paul Gardien, Philips experiences. Not every object needs to scream for attention. A room full of such objects can be overpowering. When Sottsass designed furniture, he was thinking about the room in which the chair would live and of the life of the people in the room. “To be an architect, you have to become very gentle, very calm, and extremely sensitive about life,” he said.
Designers are not artists. Successful designs live in people’s homes. You are not a solo performer. A designer needs to respect the value that others can bring. You are more like a band member than an artist. A good band needs a group of good musicians to be playing together in tune The responsibilities of designers are not the same as the responsibilities of artists. Designers have responsibilities to clients, to users, to the environment, as well as to themselves.
We work with increasingly diminishing resources in a world where the climate is changing and where the living species, we depend on our fast disappearing. One-third of tree species are threatened with extinction. It has been estimated that there are four chairs already in existence for every living person in the world. It is not enough to design another good-looking chair. There are already many good-looking chairs in the world. An average consumer throws away 70 pounds (31.75 kilograms) of clothing per year.
Globally we produce 13 million tons of textile waste each year 95% of which could be reused or recycled. The average use of a consumer electronics product is only six to eight months. Design for need, not fashion. Design things people need rather than things people want. Design them to be valued and to last. The sketch isn’t the end product. Do not make the sketch or the prototype jewelry that stands in the way of the best design. Iterate until you can’t improve it anymore and let the customer be part of the process all the way through the design development. Designers must have empathy. Artists do not need empathy to the same extent. An artist’s focus is self-expression. The needs of your users are most important to a designer. Beware of drugs and alcohol. Some people are genetically predisposed to dependency. I have seen these things destroy the lives, careers, and opportunities of some great designers and good people.
Much of what we call good design is about creating objects and experiences that define status and gender. Fast cars and designer furniture have status. Design helps define the structure of our society. What we find beautiful is often related to some evolutionary advantage. In all societies, for example, people find large trees with thick branches reachable from the ground beautiful. Some researchers argue that those trees allowed us to escape wild animals. Our eyes are more sensitive to color in the yellow-orange area of the spectrum. Researchers have various explanations including that this allowed us to see fruit at a greater distance or allowed us to see better under the firelight.
Clients often say they want a design like Apple but when the time comes, they are not prepared to invest in the risks that Apple has taken. Innovation involves risk and courage. Take calculated risks. Love those things the most that can love you back. Your relationships with people are ultimately more important than your relationship to design. Design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society. Design that is the result of inner compulsion has meaning. All successful design has a unique and compelling back story. Seek out the best mentors. Go to the best design school that you can afford.
In the US there are perhaps 120 schools teaching industrial design. In the first-tier design offices, the employees come from only half a dozen of those schools. If you are designing physical products like furniture, learn also about service design and experience design. Ninety-five percent of Americans work in service industries. If you design the system of products, services, and experiences together, the value is ten to twenty percent greater designing them together rather than independently. It is not all bad to get fired. It can put you on a better course. Make the right type of mistakes. Some of the best designers were fired. If you are a great designer you can expect to be fired at least once. Expect change. Keep reinventing yourself. Nobody sets the rules but you and you can change your future at any moment. Never give up.
X System Storage for Haworth with Ken Krayer and Haworth team.
We are looking for talented young designers, Interior Designers, Furniture Designers, and Manufacturers to join the most anticipated program dedicated to Furniture & Interiors.
The SIT Furniture Design Award ™ was created as a way to celebrate and share the remarkable work of furniture designers and those who use furniture in their projects. Creativity, innovative vision, and accessibility in the furniture design community deserve to be applauded and shared widely, across the world.
Remo Hämmerle is the Owner, Furniture Designer & Maker of Owner of Fasswerk Hämmerle; based in Switzerland, he is giving a new life to old oak barrels. Winner of the SIT Furniture Design Award 2020 with the Maximus Dining table, Remo & his “partner in crime” Nadine Ledergerber shared their passion for wood & craftsmanship.
Can you share with us your professional journey? Where are you based?
When I was a little boy, my neighbor built a small wooden bicycle shed. This fascinated me so much that I decided to do a carpentry apprenticeship. At the age of 15, I started my apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker in a small family company.
The apprenticeship was hard, and I failed the final exam and had to add a year. After that, I worked in the assembly department of a large furniture company. I did not like this at all. My girlfriend Nadine Ledergerber gave me the idea to make furniture out of old wine barrels.
The first attempts failed miserably. But I did not want to give up. So I kept trying and slowly but surely it worked. We started selling our products and the feedback of our customers, it was so satisfying that we founded our own company named Fasswerk Hämmerle in 2013.
We took about 4 years to perfect our products. It wasn’t until 2017 that we really hit the market with a small collection of barrel furniture. But then it really started. The difficult thing was getting up again and again and holding out when there was a lack of orders. But since we keep getting each other out of the deep, we are now where we are now. And that’s cool.
We are based in Goldach, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
What is “Fasswerk Hämmerle” company story? What are your guiding design principles?
Barrel Design & Woodwork: Each oak barrel tells its own story. It’s handmade and refined in the best wineries to perfection. We continue to tell its story. We breathe new life into age-old oak barrels. In our expert hands, they are carefully prepared and processed into unique barrels, tables and wooden works. We also create new custom-made pieces of furniture from hand-picked wood.
We combine Swiss craftsmanship with modern design and sustainable upcycling. Each piece of furniture gets its own personality and becomes a unique piece handcrafted to your wishes.
Sustainable Switzerland: Sustainable forestry and Swiss retailers are very close to our hearts. That’s why we work with regional companies and only process FSC-certified wood.
Partners in Crime – Remo Hämmerle & Nadine Ledergerber
In our opinion, old oak barrels have great potential for furniture design. Their shape and design radiate something venerable that should be preserved. For us, every barrel is full of possibilities and inspiration. It offers room forever new creations and ideas. Together with high-quality solid wood, the barrel becomes an innovative combination of classic craftsmanship and modern design. The results are works which we always develop in close collaboration with our customers.
When have you started using old oak barrels as the prime material for your furniture design?
Since we founded our company in 2013. That was the first thought and is still our main material we use.
What makes the “Maximus” Dining table unique? How many hours of work does one table require?
Our dining table Maximus is sustainably upcycled from used wine barrels. It’s made out of barrel staves from 3 used Burgundy barrels from the region, which contained red wine. They are framed in solid oak wood. The gaps are filled with epoxy resin in black and the solid steel table legs are modeled on the curvature of the barrel staves. Barrel Oak is still in very good condition after used wine storage and is perfect for the creation of new furniture. The goal is to create sustainable “new”.
The complete table is made of materials from Switzerland and is handmade in our workshop in Goldach.
The production is extremely complex. The barrel staves must first be dried, then they are cut to size and lined up so that the distances are approximately equal. When filling with epoxy, it is important to calculate the exact amount and to make sure that no bubbles form when pouring (sometimes I have to pour at 2 intervals). The drying time usually takes three days.
After that, I can continue to work on the table. The whole process takes about 50-60 hours. ( More information on the Maximus Dining Table)
Where can we buy a “Maximus” dining table?
At the moment you can buy Maximus in our workshop or directly on our website. The cool thing is when you buy this table you get 6 bottles of the red wine that was stored in these barrels that were processed in the table.
What are you working on at the moment, and do you have any upcoming Design projects or collaborations that you’re able to share with us?
We have a partnership with a grill manufacturer in St. Gallen called Azado Grill. We are currently working on a limited-edition version, where we produce the wooden elements using the same process as the Maximus dining table.
“Fassado” Grill Limited Edition by Fasswerk – Azado AG
Switzerland – The prestigious SIT Furniture Design Award 2021 is now open, receiving submissions from Furniture Designers, Interior Designers, Industrial Designers, Manufacturers, Brands, and Design Studios globally.
SIT Furniture Design Award was created to celebrate and recognize the remarkable work of furniture designers, interior designers. Creativity, innovative vision, and accessibility in the furniture design community deserve to be applauded and shared widely, across the world.
“SIT Furniture Design Award fosters new opportunities between Furniture Designers and Interior Designers.” said Astrid Hébert, Co-founder and Program Director; adding that “The program is also open to students; it’s a unique opportunity to showcase the ingenuity of a new generation of Designers.”
The winner of the “Innovation of the Year” will receive a grant of US$3000 to create a prototype or to start production. Each year, a different topic will be chosen, focusing on projects which highlight innovation, closely examine today’s challenges, and find ways to overcome them.
“Looking at challenges and seeking ways to overcome them are central to furniture design. For this reason, the SIT Furniture Design Award has created an Innovation Center focusing on projects which highlight invention,” said Hossein Farmani, co-founder.
This year, the Innovation Center focuses on Smart Furniture, which covers two broad subcategories: Technology integration and being Smart/adaptable.
Entries to the program will be anonymously judged by an influential jury panel of experienced academics and established design industry professionals whose mandate is to recognize and award the absolute best designers. Each jury member brings a wealth of knowledge, with their combined insight and votes; the final winners will be selected.
The SIT Furniture Design Award will close on February 15th, 2022. Receive a 15% discount on the submission fees by applying before the 31st of July 2021!
For Immediate Release
Press Contact: info@sitaward.com
The company’s key mission is to promote design through awarding great designs, exhibiting, developing designers and artist communities, providing networking opportunities, and advancing the appreciation of excellence in design through education, outreach, and grants.
Developed by Hossein Farmani and Astrid Hébert, 3C Awards is part of a larger organization Three C Group GmbH based in Switzerland and specialized in Awards, Marketing, Media, and Events. 3C Awards represent today’s diversity and innovation in Lighting Design, Furniture Design, Interior Design, and Architecture. Each brand is a symbol of design excellence around the world, showcasing Professional and Emerging designer’s work to over 100 expert jury members. 3C awards is part of Three C Group GmbH, a Swiss-registered company based in Grabenstrasse 15a, 6340 Baar, Switzerland. More information available on: www.3Cawards.com
Under the company Three C Group GmbH, 3C Awards will play a key role to develop our footprint in Europe and support the growth of our programs:
Three C Group GmbH is a sister company to Farmani Group, founded by Hossein Farmani. Farmani Group is a leading organization curating and promoting photography, design, and architecture across the globe since 1985.
The Farmani Group is responsible for many successful awards around the globe. Farmani Group organizes the International Design Awards (IDA), Architecture Masterprize, DNA, Paris Design Awards, London International Creative Awards, Prix de la Photographie in Paris, and the Annual Lucie Awards for Photography, which has emerged as one of the world’s most prestigious awards.
If you would like more information in regards to the program and our company, please contact: astrid.hebert@threec.group
We sat with David Rockwell, Architect, and Designer behind the Rockwell Group and winner of the “SIT 2020 Furniture Design of the Year” for “Sage by David Rockwell for Benchmark.“ David talked to us about his combined passions for Architecture and Theater, the design vision of “Sage for Benchmark” and how to remain creative.
Could you tell us a little about your professional journey?
I went to Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Architectural Association in London to learn the craft. I worked as an intern for the lighting designer Roger Morgan. He took me under his wing and made me his assistant draftsman. Working for him helped me realize that I could pursue and combine my passions for architecture and theater. I worked briefly for a firm and started my own architecture and design firm shortly after, in 1984. My first restaurant project was Sushi Zen in New York in 1983.
How did you discover your passion for Design?
As a child, I was constantly making structures, rearranging, building up, tearing down, and starting over. I didn’t really think of it as specifically as design back then, but more of increasing awareness of how impactful environments could be.
That sensitivity was reinforced during my first theater experience in New York. Watching Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway was life-changing. I became aware that environments could actually be controlled, manipulated, and ultimately designed. Then I was hooked.
Later, our family moved to Guadalajara, Mexico when I was an adolescent. The highly energetic and dense urban environments saturated with color, objects, and action exposed me to a thrill and vibrancy that stays with me to this day.
What was your design & creative process when working on the “Sage” Furniture set for Benchmark?
Benchmark was interested in creating a workplace furniture collection inspired by a sense of kinship—each piece should feel related and sit comfortably together, but also serve different functions and have its own unique traits.
At Rockwell Group, we like to collaborate with partners on products that tell a story, and we thought there was a really interesting dynamic between Benchmark’s simple approach and use of natural materials and our interest in theatrical vibrancy and elegance.
We believed we could create this “family” of furniture that told a story about wellness and adaptability. We started with a very simple question, which was, “What do people need to feel comfortable at work and at home?” If there is a trend in workplace design—it’s that wherever we work, whether it’s in an office, a hotel lobby, or at home—it’s that workplaces are personal spaces.
Adaptability, privacy, and an appropriate sense of scale are key to establishing wellbeing in your personal space. Transformation is also key. Many of the pieces in the collection serve more than one purpose. We wanted to create a product that is as good for people’s wellbeing as it is for the planet, so we used the tenets of biophilic design to frame the collection. This meant natural materials, colors and textures, rounded profiles, and inviting ergonomic shapes.
When was the “Sage” collection launched?
Launch Date: 100% Design, September 18-21, 2019
What are you working on now? What is in the pipeline for you?
This spring, we are thrilled that Phaidon will publish Drama, a rigorous exploration of David’s principles and ideas in action, found in examples from both architecture and theater, from both inside and outside the firm.
We’re looking forward to the opening in the fall of FUTURES, an exhibition celebrating the 175th anniversary of the Smithsonian. Located at the 1881 Arts & Industries Building in Washington, D.C., the exhibition is a preview of the future-oriented, dynamic content that the AIB will host after the building’s renovation: A prototype for the building’s next big chapter and its first major exhibition in 20 years.
OpenStage NYC is a new initiative that utilizes portable staging to help arts organizations move to outdoor performances this summer.
What is your secret to creativity?
Creative friction is an engine for many of our projects and always nurtured in all our projects. To achieve this we encourage design teams to be a mix from very experienced and younger, wise and green, specialist and generalist, dreamers and pragmatists.
As for good designers, I think they have an overabundance of the curiosity gene, are very willing collaborators, and just have an unbridled passion for new ideas.
My focus has always been on uncovering opportunities in every project, to make a difference, make something that hasn’t been done, to make something new, regardless of scale or type – that helps me stay curious.
Last, what would be your best advice to young talented Designers?
I tell students and young designers to look for ideas and solutions in the uncharted spaces between disciplines, between typologies. I think the “in between” space, and the edges and boundaries of a discipline, is where fresh ideas are born.
Winners of the SIT Furniture Design Award ” Interior design of the Year”, we sit with Zhezeng Xiong and Zhenghui Long, from Vanpin Architecture Design; discussing their passion for Interior Design and how they integrate natural lighting and the local environment when working on the Country Garden Nantong Riverbank Sales Office project.
Could you tell us a little about your professional journey?
Zhezeng Xiong（Tidus Xiong): I started working as an Interior Designer after graduating from college; it has now been for over a decade. Today, I am a proud Director of Interior Design, a husband, and a father of a lovely daughter! Being focus on Design is not only my passion, but it has also brought me success and happiness. There are still mountains to climb, I am not going to stop now… I will keep working hard for it!
Zhenghui, Long (Apple Long): I studied art at college while dreaming to be an art teacher. Gradually my interest in the “soft” interior decoration field grew as my passion for colors grew.
How did you discover your passion for Interior Design?
Zhezeng Xion (Tidus Xiong): Design is everywhere, and it’s one of the most important elements to differentiate a product from mediocrity. The design adds value to all products, making them more beautiful, practical and human. Design is a lifelong endeavor because there is no “best” design. Once I realized this, it grows in me.
Zhenghui, Long (Apple Long): The use of color in interior design, matching with accessories, is in a way the same as the “art of painting”, and that’s what I’m interested in. I am applying what I’ve learned in my studies, to my work. It‘s a bit of a waste if what you’ve learned in an academic study, doesn’t help your career, isn’t it?
What was your design process when working on the “Country Garden Nantong Riverbank Sales Office”?
Zhezeng Xiong（Tidus Xiong): The design team stayed on site for a week to study the location, then we look at many concepts suggested by all parties involved to finalize a design proposal.
Zhenghui, Long (Apple Long): We decided to use natural colors, then everything just falls into place logically.
What was the project Design brief?
Zhezeng Xiong (Tidus Xiong): The local landscape of the Nantong region has its own characteristics: Endless Reeds, lotus, and vast stretches of water. We decided to have dense reed inside the sales office together with lotus leaves to have the impression that the natural environment is growing indoor.
Can you please share with us, what winning the “Interior Design of the Year” prize means to you?
Zhezeng Xiong（Tidus Xiong): There is an old saying in China ‘If you don’t go back to your hometown, it’s like walking in a beautiful dress at night.’ Now thanks to globalization and the SIT Furniture Design Award, our work can be recognized by people all over the world. Of course, it is a great honor for designers to be awarded!
Zhenghui, Long (Apple Long): 2020 has been difficult, I really find some consolation in this prize.
What are you working on now? What is in the pipeline for you?
Zhezeng Xion（Tidus Xiong): Currently, I’m busy coordinating different teams and working on a series of projects. With the Covid crisis, it is difficult to travel abroad. I wish; I will soon be able to travel, recharge and look for new ideas and inspirations, just like the old days. I believe it will happen in the near future!
Zhenghui, Long (Apple Long): I’m going to take a long vacation. Design is a process that both ends are important, which are studying and creating. Without study, you are just copying yourself.
Meet David Rockwell, the Designer of Sage by David Rockwell for Benchmark!
Sage by David Rockwell began with a question: What does a person need to feel comfortable both at home and at work?
Adaptability, privacy, and wellness are key to establishing a sense of wellbeing in your personal space. Working closely with Benchmark and using sustainable, non-toxic materials and finishes, Rockwell Group’s collection is optimized for the workplace, but would feel at home in hospitality or residential space. Using biophilic design as a starting point, the collection features flexible pieces, many of which transform at the touch of a button or toss of a pillow to accommodate multiple uses.
The forms of our seating and tables are soft, supple, and supportive, emphasizing natural wood finishes and sustainable sourced upholstery materials. The pieces are made of a combination of ash and sycamore wood with blackened finished copper accent detailing and natural upholstery in layers of coconut fiber, natural latex, recycled shredded denim, and lamb’s wool.
A conversation with Sergio Sesmero the winner of the SIT 2020 Emerging Furniture Designer of the Year, student of the Esne – Escuela Universitaria De Innovación, Diseño Y Tecnología in Madrid.
Could you tell us a little about yourself? Where you from?
I was born in 1997 in Madrid, Spain. Experience, abstraction, philosophy and society have guided my designs in the different fields in which I have worked.
I have tried to establish with my designs the possibility of a dialogue between theory and praxis, between knowledge and doing in the field of artistic activity and design. With a special interest in avant-garde design, I present myself as a person who is not afraid to experiment through the dialectic between opposites and taking design to extremes, until I find a synthesis of concepts. I have worked in different fields (design, production, and commerce) that have influenced my approach to projects, collaborating on projects in various sectors such as furniture, automotive, consumer electronics, fashion, and accessories.
How did you discover your passion for Design and decided to study at Esne – Escuela Universitaria De Innovación, Diseño Y Tecnología in Spain?
I discovered my interest in design through a project I did in the electrical engineering course, I was studying before product design. During the course of that work, I realized how interesting it was for me to redefine the shapes, materials and functions of everyday objects.
Afterward, I decided to leave that career and look for another one where I could experiment again with the design of different products, that’s where ESNE appeared.
What was your design process when working on the “Memoria Chair”?
In the process, my main interest was to make a sociological study that would give me some clues about the direction design might take in the coming years.
I started to discover new figures and personalities in design who were having a lot of influence on the current scene, and in turn, I dedicated myself to studying all their references, building up my own. These included people like Martin Margiela, Magritte, and Hegel, who had an important influence on this work.
Can you please share with us, what becoming the winner of the “Emerging Furniture Designers of the Year” means to you?
Honestly, I think it will be an added pressure to all the work that comes after Memoria Chair. This does not have to be a bad thing, on the contrary, as it is a great recognition of my work and the ideas that I intend to capture in my designs. So I am very grateful for this recognition by the jury and the contest.
What are you working on now? When will you finish your study?
I finished my studies in September last year. I am currently learning digital fashion design and 3d modeling. I am also building a studio in Madrid, which will be dedicated to the union and synthesis between different disciplines such as fashion design and product design.
What can we wish you for in the future?
I would like to continue experimenting and participating in different disciplines such as fashion design or architecture. Without forgetting product and furniture design as a basis for the development of innovative ideas.
