Kajsa Willner Says: Don’t Waste Waste, Turn It into Furniture

Designer Kajsa Willner Offers Insights into “Crafted Potential” Exhibit

Interior Design: “Crafted Potential” features a collection of objects and furniture pieces made out of residual materials and by-products from the manufacturing process. How did the show come about?

Kajsa Willner: The Malmö design store Olsson & Gerthel reached out, saying I was free to do whatever I wanted with just two conditions: I had to collaborate with a furniture manufacturer, and the project should finish with some kind of exhibition in the store.

ID: Once Fogia was chosen as the manufacturer, where did you go from there?

KW: I was looking to explore the potential of rein­troducing production waste back into the furniture-making system, using it as an untapped material resource. So I began by looking at Fogia’s whole operation to see if it could be done in an improved way. The company was very open and transparent about its industrial by-products—wood scraps, sawdust, textile fiber, leather—showing me all the numbers and so on. I also visited the factory in Poland to understand how the facility really worked and gain a better understanding of the various materials’ complete life cycles. Of course, there’s a lot of timber in the waste stream, especially scraps in many different shapes, sizes, and species. I used some of them to construct the four vases, which just came out spontaneously—sometimes the hands have the intelligence!—but then I began thinking, Could I do something bigger with them? Hence the armchair and the pedestal table. The material itself puts a constraint on you—the form, dimensions, and availability of the offcuts determines what objects built with them will look like.

ID: Yes, the pieces made of wood scraps are like super-pixelated 3-D renderings of the regular things. But are they functional too?

KW: Yes. The chair is actually pretty comfortable, though it shouldn’t be because neither the seat nor backrest is at an angle. There’s a glass cylinder for flowers in each of the vases, objects I’d like to keep producing in the studio if we can work out how to get the wood scraps here. I asked the factory to produce a couple of prototypes for the exhibition—the pink low table and the blue plinth—which were made with finger-joint waste pine. It will be interesting to see if Fogia can put them into production in the long-term.

ID: Along with upcycling, did the exhibition investigate various forms of material development?

KW: We included a few material samples of a poten­tially new composite made with sawdust and bone glue, a natural adhesive that’s a by-product of the meat industry. Another interesting material we worked with is recycled Nature Loft, a wool-fiber padding Fogia fills cushions and mattresses with. Using traditional papermaking techniques, we shredded and mixed it with tapestry glue, creating a feltlike textile that we molded into a series of organ­ically shaped sconces resembling coral reefs or sea anemones. LEDs inside create a soft, warm glow.

ID: Was the exploration of traditional craft techniques and processes a central theme of the show?

KM: Yes, I’m always interested in how craft techniques might influence new manufacturing systems that are less rigid and more scalable, productive, and sus­tainable. (The show was called “Crafted Potential” for a reason.) We made a vase and a little wall shelf out of upholstery-leather remnants using wet-forming, a process developed in ancient Egypt and Greece to make body armor, where the hide is soaked in water and then shaped by drying it on a mold. But as with all the themes investigated in the exhibition—upcycling, material development, collaboration, implementation—the use of craft techniques sug­gests that maybe the future of furniture design is more about liquid, scalable production in which some items are made on a small scale, others on a middle scale, while others involve mass production.