Dysfunctional furniture series 01

Type | Furniture Design    Year | 2022    Project site | Rotterdam, Netherlands

Client | self-initiated

What is useful? What is waste? What is beautiful? What is ugly? Does utility always equate to goodness and uselessness to badness? When does an object become useless? When does something become garbage? These stools are part of a series being developed on dysfunctional objects. The primary objective of modern-day consumer products is functionality. Modernity has emphasized human-centered goals largely focused on convenience, comfort, cleanliness, and status. These modern consumer habits have come at the expense of environmental degradation, climate crisis, and the mass extinction of species.

Dysfunctional furniture series 01 comprises two coffee tables made with scrap metal and wax “terrazzo” designed to melt and collapse when hot beverages are placed on them, or to “dodge” and “throw” the cup onto the floor if incited to be useful. A product designed to ‘resist’ its use and overturn the logic of optimal performance and functionality we would expect from it, exploring and experimenting with anti-design as a speculative research method, disclosing alternative aesthetics and formal languages.

Perhaps, we do not need everything to be new, pristine, and convenient. Perhaps starting with somewhat dysfunctional objects can lead the way to new values for design in the post-Anthropocene era.