Circular Design, Two Ways
The Afterlife crate by Odd Matter for Supernovas (image: Choreo).
“It doesn’t directly say: I’ve been waste before,” says Els Woldhek, one half of the Rotterdam-based studio Odd Matter. “As a consumer you want something you’d want to use, not just because you can say it’s recycled. It needs to be precious.”
That precious thing is Afterlife, Odd Matter’s new furniture collection for London-based brand Supernovas. The collection contains a mono-material crate and a bench, executed in pop-bright colours produced by mixing postindustrial and post-consumer plastic waste. The crate’s curved, speckled form suggests the gravitas of granite, but souped-up in a candy hue.
The crate was selected for the initial collection thanks to the typology’s flexibility – it can serve as storage, a plant pot, a beer cooler, a bin (the original idea), or “a perfect vinyl holder,” according to Supernova’s founder Massimiliano Rossi. Both crate and bench are also stackable thanks to a system of curved “nipple” connectors. “I’m interested in things that evolve with me, rather than design that is framed as static,” explains Rossi. “Instead of just having a table, I want to know what this table can be in three months.”
The design of Afterlife is intended to distil Supernovas’s overarching ethos of encouraging more circular modes of furniture consumption. The brand lets customers buy its products outright, or alternatively sign up for a “streaming” service whereby you pay a fixed amount each month up to the total cost of the product – a business model that ties to the rise of “buy now, pay later” services such as Klarna. After a short minimum period, customers can swap a design for another product from Supernovas’s range. Once a piece is fully paid off, you can keep it or, alternatively, return it to the brand for future discounts. Returned products are resold or else recycled for future Supernovas designs. This flexibility, the brand hopes, will mean that no product slips outside its cycle of recycling and reuse.
Supernovas’s model is an effort to avoid some of the wastefulness of fast furniture, without donning the hairshirt of environmental marketing. “We started from a reaction to the doom and gloom of the narrative around sustainability,” says Rossi. Rather than showing “images of rivers full of plastic just to sell a T-shirt,” he explains, Supernovas opted for a vibrant aesthetic. It is also, Rossi says, a rejection of the “buy once and use forever” philosophy familiar to the design world. Instead, it seeks to acknowledge the fact that people’s homes and desires change frequently. It explains the kaleidoscope appeal of its collections – Supernovas leans into a desire for consumption and change, arguing that “designing for brevity rather than timelessness” can offer a new low-waste alternative.
Words Evi Hall
Photographs Choreo
This article was originally published in Disegno #29. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.