Copy Cows and Rocks of Foam
The images accompanying this story are from the research and development process from Design by Nature by design studio Front .
Were you to have ventured into the British countryside between 1897 and 1903, you might have stumbled across a tweed-suited man carrying a stiff-as-can-be cow on his shoulder, its legs raised towards the sky, its horns pointing downward. A little over a century later, if you venture into Sweden’s forests, you may run into two women equipped with laptops and floodlights, pointing chunky gun-like equipment at the rocks and trees. What these scenarios have in common, peculiar as they may be, is their protagonists’ devotion to capturing the natural world.
As you may have twigged, the aforementioned cow was no ordinary cow. It was, in fact, a photography cubbyhole disguised as an ox, designed by Richard and Cherry Kearton to enable them to get close to their subjects: birds.
The Kearton brothers were pioneers of nature photography, pursuing this new discipline at the turn of the 19th century when cameras were starting to be more commercially available. They are credited with taking the first ever photographs of eggs in a bird’s nest and inspiring the likes of David Attenborough. Their aptly named “Imitation Ox” consisted of a sturdy but light wooden frame, “rendering it strong enough to carry the weight of a man, and at the same time sufficiently light to be easily deported on the shoulder,” writes Richard Kearton in his book Wild Nature’s Ways (1909). The pair completed their Trojan cow apparatus by preserving and stretching the hide, head and legs of a cow over it. They took turns concealing themselves inside, entering through a slit in the underbelly, and waiting for hours for birds to grow comfortable enough to approach. Then, they’d snap the perfect picture using a camera whose lens peeped out from a small incision in the cow’s breast.
“Using 3D modelling, photography and rendering technologies, designers Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren “collect” the contours, textures and forms of the wooded world.”
The second of the aforementioned scenarios may have brought to mind a forensic murder investigation or a scene from a spy movie. Actually, however, it describes Front, a Swedish design studio, caught in the act of 3D scanning the forest. Using 3D modelling, photography and rendering technologies, designers Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren “collect” the contours, textures and forms of the wooded world as part of a much larger ongoing research project that the studio calls Design by Nature.
Front’s long-term research project is based on the seemingly simple premise of Lagerkvist and Lindgren visiting forests. The project began about six years ago and stems from a love of being in woodland, as well as fond memories of childhoods where the forest acted as an “extended living room”, says Lindgren. Observing that people’s behaviour and movements are more vibrant when in the forest, but that this vibrancy is lost in the interior spaces in which we spend most of our time, they were curious to understand why. “We thought the idea of the difference between the indoor environment and the wild forests was an interesting starting point for design,” says Lagerkvist.
As such, Front started to “collect” the forest through drawings and photographs, before diversifying into 3D scanning, the study of research papers, collaborations with scientists, and the careful compilation of archival photographs. The studio’s repeated use of the word “collect” to describe its undertakings suggests that it is approaching nature curatorially or anthropologically, and operating from a certain non-interventionist distance – letting nature do the designing. “At first, we didn’t think, ‘Oh, this will be a research project,’” explains Lindgren. However, over time, as the designers began to revel in the damp quietness of lichen-laden landscapes, noticing details such as the natural seats hollowed into a rock’s surface by millennia of weather, their explorations developed into a more deliberate and planned research venture, with a number of strands.
Front prioritised designing its research process over predicting any specific outcome. The studio decided to revisit and document specific areas of forests “over and over again, in different conditions, different times of the day, different times of the year, different weathers,” while deliberately leaning into a certain ambiguity. “We tried not to pinpoint at the beginning where it would end up,” says Lagerkvist. It is unusual to begin a design project without any goal or final design product in mind – with no brief, no financial backing, no client. Yet no commission comes without constraints. “We like the idea of working a bit like an artist’s studio or like when we were studying,” says Lindgren. “You find a topic and then you dive into it and see what will happen.” It takes confidence to stray from a more conventional design process. This project, says Front, is the studio’s “way of exploring what a designer can be or what design can do.” It’s a nice idea that you can radically rethink design by simply committing to spending time amongst the trees.
“We tried not to pinpoint at the beginning where it would end up.”
Both the Keartons’ and Front’s process is based on mimicry of nature – although to different ends. The Keartons imitated nature to get close to it, while Front captures and collects nature to eventually imitate it. The brother’s copy cow was just one of a number of disguise devices that they invented to avoid alarming birds and other creatures. “I have learnt some of the sweetest secrets of the sod by transfiguring myself into a graminivorous animal, rock, tree, or other equally innoxious object,” wrote Richard Kearton. Their sleuth repertoire included objects such as a life-like sheep (this time sitting to avoid the “fatal drawback” of the ox, which was prone to falling over in the wind); a “wooden mask” covered with bark; a lightweight, mobile, four-part flat-pack fake rock; and “chameleonlike” caps and jackets that were the colour of “dead grass brown on one side and living field green on the other”. While some of these disguises and smoke screens were inspired by the British military’s methods of concealment, John Bevis, author of The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography, points out that the brothers’ use of camouflage clothing pre-empted the armed forces’ use of khaki by a few years. The pair were aware of the importance of their process, and took time to document their weird and wonderful designs through photographs and books, detailing how they succeeded in capturing challenging subjects.
Fake rocks also crop up in Design by Nature, in a format that reveals Front’s ideas. The studio’s research has led it to work with a number of brands to translate its collected nature into designed objects. One of these commercial outcomes is a wilderness furniture collection for Moroso (also called Design by Nature, somewhat confusingly), which hyper-realistically recreates mosscovered rocks, mounds and snowdrifts as footstools, sofas, and other objects. The natural forms are replicated through 3D scanning, foam milling and incredibly intricate, woven upholstery. Front explains that it was playing with the question of whether, through 3D scanning, “it would be possible to, more or less, just grab a piece of land” and recreate its “wilderness without abstracting it too far”. In other words, to copy the forest and paste it into the domestic sphere.
What does it mean to copy and mimic nature? To collect it? To document it through skilful and deliberate processes? In design, copies are everywhere but they tend to be frowned upon, embroiled as the industry is in profit production, copyright laws and questions of authorship. But as technologies of reproduction such as 3D scanning swiftly develop, the copy is becoming ever more present, sophisticated and discussed.
When I look to other examples of designers engaging with 3D scanning, I am struck by how many of them are grappling with themes of loss. Colin Keays, a designer, writer and curator, has created an archive of 3D-scanned gay bars and queer spaces, in a project that he titled gaybar.archive. Writing in Failed Architecture Keays explains that his collection is “an attempt to document them before they disappear”. He notes that London has “lost half of its LGBTQ+ venues over the last decade,” and “San Francisco’s last remaining lesbian bar closed its doors in 2015.” On a larger scale, Iconem, a Paris-based technology start-up, uses drones and other technology to 3D scan heritage sites, with a particular focus on places that are “at risk”.[1] For example, Iconem has worked with the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums to document historically significant places facing threats due to the civil war, including sites such as the Saladin castle, the Citadel of Aleppo and the Umayyad Mosque. The citadel was, in part, destroyed in the devastating earthquake on 6 February 2023. One imagines that Iconem’s digital twin could now act as a guide for restoring it, or perhaps will serve as a historic document of something that will never be again.
“I begin to wonder if its research, which is now a living document of the Swedish forests, might one day transform into another archive of absence.”
Anaïs Aguerre and Brendan Cormier write in the introduction to the book Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction that copies “play a significant role in stemming the tide of loss and depredations”. Aguerre and Cormier specifically refer to the loss of manmade artefacts – sculptures, buildings, monuments, archives. But, by applying this lens of loss to Front’s collection of nature, I begin to wonder if its research, which is now a living document of the Swedish forests, might one day transform into another archive of absence, given the current state of our world in climate collapse. Will the lichen that have lived in the woods for thousands of years fall victim to increased air pollution? Will the trees be cut down to meet humans’ insatiable desire for things? Will snow no longer fall as temperatures continue to rise and rise?
Front did not set out to tackle the climate crisis overtly through Design by Nature, but the designers recognise their project’s entanglement with this broader context. “We’ve found lots of research about how people have become so disconnected from nature and green areas today,” says Lagerkvist. “There are studies, for example, that show that children who spend more time in nature are much more likely to have a stronger relationship with the idea of sustainability and various environmental questions, because they relate to it and understand that we are part of it – we are nature as human beings too.” Front’s research process, then, can be used as a blueprint for those hoping to reconfigure their relationship with the world around them and, by default, the loss of it – simply spend more time outside. Front’s more tangible outcomes of furniture, fabric and other products that mimic elements of the natural world also encourage a shift in perception. By translating nature into design objects, Lingdren and Lagerkvist invite us to look more closely at things that are often taken for granted or overlooked – rocks and moss, bark and individual pine needles.
It is in the space between celebration and despair that the idea of a copy feels full of potential. Copying can be more than a back-up plan for loss: it is also a tool to focus our attention. To say, “Look how remarkable this thing is. How can you neglect it? Enjoy it! Celebrate it! Cherish it!” Copying something acknowledges its beauty, its importance, its need to be documented, and its value. As the saying goes, imitation is the highest form of flattery. If that is the case, then Design by Nature is an extensive and ongoing ode to the Swedish forests and nature more broadly. In revealing the extensive depth and breadth of work that designers (or photographers) undertake to develop a process for copying, it uncovers the depth and breadth of their ongoing care.
1 See ‘The Battle for Palmyra’ by Lemma Shehadi in Disegno #16.
Words Lara Chapman
Photography Front
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.