Greenhouse is a department at the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair where emerging designers and design schools showcase their prototypes for the industry’s most important producers, journalists and visitors from around the world. We have selected six projects seen at the 2020 edition that inspired us for their vision on sustainability and the effective understanding of the potential of materials.

Posture X is a study of seating, a curiosity about comfort and ergonomics, with a construction that involves minimum treatment.It is also a choice of a sustainable and natural material, widely available in Finland. Jenni Inciarte Villaverde is a Finnish Interior Architect and a Designer who is currently completing her Master’s Degree at Aalto University. In her project Posture X she experimented with the potential of aspen wood both in terms of solidity and flexibility. 

She designed a series of three chairs, each of them meant for a specific use: dining, reading and lounging. The gentle curvature of the back panel, inserted in the seat, adjusts under one’s weight and thus is shaped around the uses. While sitting, it may produce a muted creak: “it reminds me of the muffled sound the snow makes when you step on it, which I associate with the sound of nature” she says.The designer describes her approach as holistic, with the aim to find the perfect balance between gentle details and basic structures.“Posture is the place where to sit, breathe and reload yourself”.

“We are not making furniture that adjusts to people’s behaviour... we want our products to change people’s lifestyle. Encourage minimalism for a population constantly on the move ”says the Chinese designer Le Li. The“urban nomad” is a type of person who lives in big city areas in China and moves frequently, following new careers or relationships.

With every move comes the trouble of managing one’s belongings, and furniture to top it all. Keep buying new products is at the same time a waste of money, of time and of resources. Keeping old furniture may not always be an option. The Urban Nomad collectionis dedicated to exploring this modern life pattern, and it is easier to produce, assemble, move, change and upgrade to complement new life scenarios.

Multiple functions are combined in one product, which works in a limited living space as well as in a bigger space, just by “updating” the design with new features, as one does with apps. Gravity helps maintain the systems structurally in balance in the absence of panels, replaced by threads and iron tubes.

Malin Fleen is a Furniture Designer and Cabinet Maker who describes her design as “a material and process based project with a focus on sustainability and a collaboration between tradition and technology”. The starting point was Baltic Yachts, a Finnish sailboat company. The designer wanted to investigate more environmentally friendly materials and processes for the manufacture of the interiors of boats.

So the idea came for a product that can be produced, destroyed if needed, and reprinted again in a fullcycle. The core of the chair is 3D printed in a bio composite material consisting of PLA and cellulose. The core is then wrapped in a layer of flax fibre laminate (flax as the fibre crop from which linen is made) to guarantee strength and durability. The designer emphasizes the relevance of the combination between traditional craftsmanship and new technology in order to reduce negative effects on the environment.

The first year Master students of Lund University got the opportunity to develop projects in collaboration with Swedish glass factories. The idea was not only to develop glass products, but also to understand the potential of this material applied in sustainable, cyclic systems for the future. Víctor M Padilla Figuerola is one of these students, who researched the extension of the life cycle of fruits, between the harvest and their consumption.

Most people want to buy fruit only when it is ready to be consumed, and this creates a very short time window for supermarkets. Overripe fruit needs often to be disposed because it didn’t sell on time, resulting in an unsustainable amount of waste. As Figuerola explains, “Climacteric fruits are those who keep ripening after being harvested, such as apples, bananas, pears. As they ripen, they release ethylene gas, which acts as a natural accelerant of the process. The two-piece fruit bowl I designed provides a simple solution by creating two functions. The top piece serves as a regular fruit bowl, whereas the bottom has aripening pocket that allows to case the gas and to control the maturing process”.

This bowl has thus the potential to reduce food waste, because the users can buy unripe fruit and decide later on what they want to be ready for consumption. Clear glass allows visibility during the process, and makes the product fully recyclable.

Austere yet playful, an assembly of precisely engineered brass frames connected by articulated flexible joints and fine-spun gold chains, the modular pendant system is readily customizable in vertical, horizontal or curved configurations to adjust to various designs and environments.

The designer Paul Chan explains that this collection of pendant stakes advantage of the electrical conductivity of its goldchain, thus removing cables. Inspired by the poetic tactility of Kusari-doi – the ornate linked chains used to spout rainwater from the eaves of Japanese temples  – the Either/Or Pendant elicits an ethereal beauty with soft cascading lighting akin to rainwater glittering as it washes down a delicate chain, defying gravity.

Has time become as precious as the people around us? The lack of closeness and human interaction can make us feel separated from our grounds. The student Samuel Norlind designed this series of lamps by steam bending ash wood, and adding a sphere of silicone that contains a light that seems to be suspended in mid-air.

The bended wood functions as a structure for the lamp, as a channel to conduct cables and as an organic shape that suggests harmony and union, where the light creates the physical contact. These objects exist between two people, as a symbolic gesture of belonging.