Therese Granlund: Form follows foam

Young Swedish designer Therese Granlund has recently presented her project Form Follows Foam at the Design Academy Eindhoven 2012 graduate show, during October's Dutch Design Week. The series seeks to criticise the current design scene, and is an investigation into what would be a more vital, challenging, and unpredictable design. Granlund seeks to confront and attack "the obsession with perfection and control."

"Design can be seen as the vehicle of the established aesthetics of our time," states the designer. "But it is a car stuck in the slow lane, constantly being overtaken by other media in popular culture. A state of indifference has turned the design industry into a gathering of narcissistic cowards, a club that also includes myself."

In a process where Granlund sought to design the way out of her own better judgment, the designer started an active search, "for a method/material where I was being forced to confront my own conclusions of aesthetics, where I needed to sacrifice my obsession of control in order to reach a better state of creativity." Granlund chose to work out of polyurethane, which she characterises as "a low class material with all lacks of any pretension or artificiality that would vainly over shine meaning and function," and also the most used material in furniture industry today.

The final furniture series presents archetypal design typologies — a chair, a cabinet, a stool, among others — with deformed, uncanny additions, which seem to be halfway between a solid and liquid state. "I play with desire and provocation with a collection of furniture that blurs our perceptions of taste and values, acceptance and trash," states Granlund. "The furniture is as mush of a statement as a functional object, a manifest imbedded within the objects' functionality and appearance. If I can stay balanced on the border between attraction and repulsion I have succeeded."