I have already done a report on the colours at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen. This time I want to share my thoughts on other things.
The Danish capital proved once again that it is an important hub for Nordic and Scandinavian design. Absolutely. I read somewhere that the design week had over 20 000 international guests. Impressive.
Nature
One of the trend themes for this year was absolutely nature. A wild and untamed kind of nature. We saw it already in Milan. Perhaps Milan brought some kind of garden feeling, but Copenhagen was much more wild.
One of my first stops was at Wrong Shop that had artwork by Erwan Bouroullec. Overlapping greenery. Kind of like adding nature to nature. More is more.
At Bolia I saw this installation with greenery that sort of grew into the store.
Bolia again with a wild green landscape.
Also Verpan had waves of nature – but coloured. Moss and still a very wild feeling.
Window display. I think this was at Occhio.
At Gubi.
And this is of course no wild greenery but it is at a design gallery cum flower shop that is kind of wild. This is Tableau. Doing design associated with green lifestyle is on trend. Who will do a design installation at a green house?? Should be something for next year.
Sustainability
It gets more and more difficult to talk about sustainability. The whole question is so complex and we are all afraid of claiming something being sustainable and then people say it isn’t. Difficult. But there were a lot of interesting discussions on sustainability in Copenhagen.
One of the most interesting ones was by Danish brand Mater. They showed plenty of materials to use, like coffee grind, recycled plastics etc, etc. Extremely well curated and nice.
What Mater did, compared to others, was how they showed how they pushed the limits constantly. Always looking for new sustainable materials. Not ONLY reused fishnets. As with this chair from another brand.
I was really happy to see Woud Design. They had several solutions. And I was really impressed with their curiosity for new concepts. This side table or stool. Here they reduce materials. The cut out in the side becomes the top of the cylinder. Clever, and still gives it a strong character. Super well done.
Not so sustainable… In general I saw how things got bigger, chunkier, bulkier and just plainly used more materials. Here wood. But I saw a lot of enormous stone or marble tables. Enormous sofas and easy chairs. I was actually puzzled and talked to a few people. For instance I ran into Swedish designer Jonas Wagell and I had to ask “is Scandinavian design dead?” What I meant was, typically Scandinavian design prides itself by being minimalistic and functional. And use minimum amount of materials. Now ot looks like the opposite. He actually had a talk about this issue at Wendelbo and showed his new sofa that was using the principal of using as little materials as possible.
Danish Takt is still very interesting to follow. They level up on design and sustainable concepts. Here a new sofa system by Norwegian Anderssen Voll.
At flower cum design gallery Tableau there were several projects where the designers used as little material as possible. The cut out of the round table top gives materials that can be used as table legs etc.
Old heroes
But the overall theme for 3 Days of Design was that everyone was doing relaunches. Everyone. And it is really nothing strange. It is a sign of our times. Movie theaters are filled with nostalgia like Top Gun, Jurassic Park and even a tv show like Stranger Things. The music scene is doing the same thing. Did you hear the new Beyonce track? Very 70s…
And we can of course blame our scary times with threat of war, pandemic, inflation etc, etc – but regardless – nostalgia is here. And there is so much of it right now, so much that we will get an overdose of it soon.
As a conclusion. Copenhagen and 3 Days of Design proved again that it is an extremely important design activity for the Northern European market. I have of course marked my calendar to go next year. I hope for new design, and not only relaunches, but still – absolutely worth going.