“Am I Just Making the Trash of the Future?” And Other Philosophical Questions With Designer Drew Abrahamson

“I always want my work to be fun, not taken too seriously, a point of conversation,” says Australian artist and designer Drew Abrahamson. And while it definitely is, it’s thoughtful, too, and even veers, in a light-hearted way, toward the kinds of philosophical questions anyone who puts anything out into the world ought to probably ask themselves: “Am I just making the trash of the future?” Abrahamson’s answer, in his recent series “We Are All Garbage,” is pretty much yes, but concedes that there’s freedom and liberation in the act of creation, especially when it isn’t so tightly tied to the constraints of marketability. 
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Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.
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Rasmus Nossbring’s Glass Sculptures Look Like They Were Squeezed Through a Tube of Swedish Caviar

For Swedish glassblower Rasmus Nossbring, it’s the immersive nature of the medium that’s so compelling. "Glass moves like nothing I've ever seen before and to use it demands full attention from your whole body and mind," says the Stockholm-based artist. "It’s like super Zen and an adrenaline rush at the same time. A lot of people describe it as a dance, and I would say that on the best days I feel like I become one with the material."
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A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe

There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.
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In Mexico City, An Up-and-Coming Design Studio Inspired by Institutional Aesthetics

The objects and furniture made by the Mexico City–based design studio Panorammma are difficult to pin in one particular box. Their concepts pivot from material focus — such as in their Neolithic Thinker chair, an upturned U-shaped seat made of volcanic tezontle stone — to abstract ideas, like the Sisyphean Table, a glass-topped Vignelli-esque cocktail table inspired by the concept of the absurd. But the thread that connects all of these approaches is a steady preoccupation with narrative and memory.
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Week of December 13, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a reconstructed 1960s apartment by Ettore Sottsass opens in Milan, six London designers exhibit works in glass and metal, and Sweden's David Taylor unveils his latest collection of bent-aluminum furniture and lighting.
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A New Exhibition Defines the Next Generation of Danish Design

The purpose of Ukurant Perspectives was to showcase a new generation of designers who are pushing the conversation forward through practices that “revalue discarded materials, create innovative composites and explore the limits of craft to redefine its importance.” Seventeen mostly Denmark-based designers were featured, all of whom pursued wildly different approaches to object and furniture design.
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Week of September 20, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: tables inspired by California's kidney-shaped pools, Gustaf Westman's latest furniture drop, and a colorful installation by Germans Ermics at last week's Design Miami Basel show (above).
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Three New Collections in Metal That Get Creative With Industrial Parts

We recently noticed a fascination, shared among three up-and-coming designers from two different parts of the globe — Sebastian Kommer, Jinyeong Yeon, and Nice Workshop — with using off-the-shelf metal materials in new, more beautiful ways. The concept itself is nothing new, but it underscores just how much endless versatility can be found in industrial parts and profiles — and how they offer emerging designers access to industrial fabrication without the expensive factory tooling and MOQs.
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Lewis Kemmenoe’s Debut Collection Features One Very Of-the-Moment Material

“For as long as I remember I loved just making things,” says London-based designer Lewis Kemmenoe. “My parents told me that when I was eight, I begged them to let me go to art school, right there and then.” He may not have matriculated quite as early as he had hoped, but Kemmenoe eventually enrolled in Central Saint Martins to study Fine Art. Eighteen months ago, he began working on his first collection of furniture, a series of chairs, tables, shelving, and lighting in burl veneer, plywood, and timber — either left in its natural state or stained with linseed to highlight the grain.
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