Dressing up for the Stockholm Furniture Fair

Making a new product by adding something to an old one is an often used theme these days. But that doesn't make it less sympathetic. Swedish designer Fredrik Färg combined it with his interest in well tailored fashion and it all turned out like this: ReCover is an old chair dressed up in a coat made by moulded felt. Not a bad idea at all, considering that the moulded felt in its turn is made out of felt fibres and old soda bottles.

Textiles by you in pioneering net store

Finnish Bon Bon Kakku is a net store that gives the customers the opportunity to design their own fabrics and sometimes even see them being produced. Everything takes place online at www.bonbonkakku.com where you can submit and rate designs. When a fabric receives enough votes from the web site visitors, it is put into production and can be bought directly from the site. A great way to give new designers and patterns a chance, if you ask me. And a great way to modernize an old company: Bon Bon Kakku is owned by the Finnish fabric and interior manufacturer Vallila Interior, a 70 year old, family owned company that once started as a textiles mill.

Depression design

Great ideas are often born during hard times. Just look at this example from the last recession, made by the Swedish architects TAF. When they didn’t have the money to print several business cards they solved the problem like this. Brilliant!

Smart textiles make people feel better

The Swedish School of Textiles in Borås goes from strength to strength. It has not only transferred Sweden into one of the world’s most interesting textile research nations in just a few years time, it has also recently managed to raise money from the Swedish government for the next eight year to come. The school is mainly into smart textiles, which basically means weaving metal threads into fabrics. As metal leads electricity smart textiles can do anything from transmitting light to change pattern when they get warm, grow, to then shrink again and generate energy that they can later give off.
Smart textiles can also make you feel better while you’re in the hospital, as master student Marie Ledendal recently showed. She launched a project whereby movements in the hospital are tracked by sensors in corridors and entrances and triggers subtile colour changes on textile panels in the patients' rooms. When someone passes a sensor, signals are sent to a computer program that steers the electricity on to threads of copper embroided in the textiles. These then changes colours.
Marie says she likes to think of the textiles as a kind of subtile conversation between the patients and the movements in the hospital. I say I would much rather look at these changing textile walls than the usual white walls of a hospital.

Look at a film visualizing the project here. Or read the article I wrote (in Swedish) about the Smart Textiles project in Dagens Nyheter a few months ago here.

Nobody's perfect

Nobody's a great idea. The chair Nobody, that is. Made out of mouldable felt, the chair designed by Danish-Russian duo Komplot Design and produced by Danish furniture company Hay, has caused quite a stir. Not only because it’s probably the first completely self-supporting textile chair that’s ever existed, and therefor light, sound proof and easy to recycle. But because it is something as unusual as a chair carefully created from fiber to product – in the same place.
The mouldable felt is produced in Halmstad, in the south of Sweden, by Nordifa, the same manufacturer that thermo-press the material into a chair. It contains felt fibres mixed with polyester fibres from old soft drink bottles and is a material that has been used for ages in cars luggage lockers and other such low- glamorous places. But nobody ever thought of using it for making a chair. Until Komplot Design, who had been collaborating with the Nordifa for a long time, happened to hear about the machine that can mould felt in the same way one usually mould wood… Now, that’s the kind of thing that would never have happened if the chair had been produced in China. The shape of the chair was born in the same minute the designers understood about the machine opportunity.
Swedish designers are now standing in line to work with the material. At the up-coming Stockholm Furniture Fair (Feb 4th-8th) there will be several new products in mouldable felt. I'll come back to this.