8 young designers who captured Domus’s attention

The practice of Mahaut Van Peel focuses on the reuse of marble discards to create simple but useful objects. In her Brussels workshop, she grinds marble shards gathered from companies that work with this material, then breaks them down even further with an anvil and hammer, and finally mixes and joins them with a composite binder to create a range of pommels and knobs that can be used as door handles. But Mahaut also likes to blend these shards with other materials such as steel powder, wood curls and discards from a glass factory.

Convinced that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Mahaut – who is 28 years old with a degree in textile design from ENSAV-La Cambre – uses other people’s “debris” to create something new and useful. The method is similar to the technique of producing Venetian terrazzo (a kind of flooring made from chips of natural stone and coloured marble), except that Mahaut does not use lime as a binder. In the end, each of her pieces is different and therefore unique, because the stones are not uniform and their grinding is the result of manual intervention. As she acknowledges, this deliberate irregularity is what she likes most about her artisan production.

On one hand, she is inspired by the people living along the Tagliamento River in Friuli, who collect stones from the riverbed to create splendid floors; and on the other, by her Brussels studio in Palais Bozar (where Mahaut works in the evening), built in the 1920s by Victor Horta in Art Deco style, with delightful floors that fascinated her and stimulated her strong desire to make something similar today. Opened in 2021, her atelier in Brussels is the workshop where all her pieces are conceived, designed and crafted. 

Collecting, combining and cataloguing. These three words sum up the design method and practice of Agnieszka Mazur and her studio (in Eindhoven). Of Polish origins, Mazur combs the beaches of the Dutch coastline (especially around Zeeland) and collects everything: shells, shards of glass, pieces of wood, bits of ceramic and brick, seaweed and sand. She is convinced that the identity of a place lies in the materials that make it up. Studying, selecting and cataloguing them can therefore be an effective way to better understand the environment, both natural and the one transformed by traces of anthropic activity.

By grinding and then combining these remnants, Mazur gives life to a sort of material atlas of places, a veritable “identity library”. The samples, composed of all kinds of mixtures, range from darker shades to very light ones and are made from feathers, fishing nets, rope, bottles, cans, plastic waste, crab shells and everything the sea swallows up and then washes back ashore. The ingredients are joined with organic binders, such as gelatine and additional additives, to obtain distinctive features like flexible surfaces or diversified textures. Mazur works with the notions of hidden things, of the discarded, neglected and the visible.

Her goal is to question and explore the meanings assigned to materials and the stories surrounding them to challenge our habitual perceptions and lead us to experiment with new ways of relating to waste. The next step is the creation of design objects that embody and combine material and visual research. These pieces – from lamps made with mussel shells to side tables created from found objects – will evoke seascapes and convey stories.

There is a very interesting current in contemporary design that addresses physical and psychological vulnerability. We could call it “discomfort design” in the sense that it tries to come up with innovative solutions to reduce, remedy and contain ever-growing social and personal malaise. Sterre ter Beek – who graduated in 2021 from Design Academy Eindhoven – works in this direction. Inspired by her grandfather who has Alzheimer’s, her ALMER project seeks to offer a sensorial experience to him and everyone like him, and maybe even a ritual that can reawaken and restart deactivated neural connections.

The name ALMER is a contraction of the word Alzheimer, keeping only the first two and final three letters, since people with Alzheimer’s remember, more or less, the first two decades and the last three minutes of their lives. The design comprises four different coffee cups, each corresponding to one of the later stages of the disease. The shapes are ancestral and evoke medieval origins, while the colour blue is tied to the home where her grandfather lived. ALMER aims to engage all five senses: the crystal-clear sound of a silver spoon tapping against the porcelain, the scent and taste of coffee, the blue of the home, and the material texture that adapts to the prehensility of the hands.

The goal is to reactivate stories, memories and bonds lost in some recess of the mind, with the surge of sensory stimulation guiding the subconscious along our innermost paths. Ter Beek personally oversees the entire process, including the creation of the moulds, and pays special attention to details, convinced that they are a seedbed of feelings and emotions. In its simplicity and tenderness, this project is indicative of a new awareness that is driving contemporary design.

Standing up. Sitting down. Ordinary actions from day-to-day life. Or rather: seemingly ordinary actions. Because, for some, a simple and instinctive action like standing up or sitting down on one’s own may be quite problematic. Visit any retirement home for the elderly to get an idea. Sarah Hossli, a young Swiss designer driven by her interest in the social impact of the products she creates, did just this. She went to various retirement homes and observed the daily life of their residents, noting the insurmountable difficulties encountered by many elderly people or those with physical disabilities.

So she designed T’Roi: a chair prototype with elongated armrests, that allows users to shift their weight forward in order to get up on their own and not lose their balance. T’Roi was then tried and tested by the inhabitants of various retirement homes, who, in general, admired the object’s functionality yet criticised its aesthetics. They asked the designer for a chair with a similar function yet more approachable, comfy and elegant. Thus Lotte was born: an armchair in wood that has the same functions as T’Roi but comes in different materials and colours.

“The biggest mistake any designer can make,” states Hossli, “is to think that people over 60 lose their interest for aesthetics and design.” This is not the case: a world where life expectancy has grown and the number of elderly people is on the rise requires us to reconsider existing life models to adapt not only homes but also urban spaces, so as to ensure that all members of a community can live self-sufficiently and maintain their network of relationships. Her creations help design rediscover its original social function yet without giving up on objects that are both poetic and emotional.

The demanding brief was to design “original solutions that contribute to a better tomorrow and improve everyone’s happiness”. Poh Yun Ru – a young designer from Singapore – participated in and won the Lexus Design Award 2022 with Rewind. Her design uses a visual display and a motion tracker to help elderly users suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia to recall familiar gestures from daily life and not lose their memory completely. Her innovative proposal is a therapeutic device aimed at cognitive stimulation. Users are prompted to mimic everyday activities, such as making a cup of tea or using a pestle and mortar to grind ingredients.

These actions are reflected on an audiovisual device that triggers the memory of these movements, in the hope of curbing or alleviating the symptoms of the disease.The design seeks to interact with the most intimate and emotional aspects of a patient’s life, even touching upon elements that current therapeutic methods are not always able to intercept. In other words, Rewind encourages instinctive behaviours that activate memories in an immediate and effective way. Poh Yun Ru is a socially engaged product designer who strives to have a positive impact on society as well as improving the lives of others. Living in a culturally rich and diversified context, she views design as a method for developing intuitive and inclusive solutions for people from all walks of life.

Her proposal – which stood out from the over 1,700 projects from across the world – is a fitting example of the kind of care-oriented design that is particularly dear to younger generations, and which considers design not only as a tool to resolve practical problems, improve comfort and beautify the world, but also as an innovative approach to help anyone at a disadvantage.

Both iconophile and iconoclast, with a devouring passion for icons from the past, they twist and distort them, as with two of their most significant works, Melting Thonet and Melting Breuer: two iconic chairs – one made in series (Thonet No. 14) and the other epitomising Bauhaus (Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer) – subjected to almost expressionistic deformation.

For the duo OrtaMiklos (the young designers Leo Orta and Victor Miklos Andersen), design is both performance and warfare, trinkets and a defunctionalised mishmash of contemporary cultures. Their works evoke the language of graffiti as well as the masters of emotional design: one cannot help but recognise the influence of Gaetano Pesce or Verner Panton, or even the Campana brothers or the radical Italians, from Archizoom to Memphis and Alchimia. No concession to production in series or the fetish of functionalism. Shapeless shapes. Experiments with materials. Driftings and creations of colour.

Born in the digital age and raised in the era of information overload, Orta and Miklos have turned their practice into the computer in which they download and combine all the urgencies of the contemporary iconosphere. In their performances they are always masked, with faces wrapped in nylon stockings deforming their features: the standard bearers of enigmatic and changing identity, they appear like industrious artisans or dangerous hijackers, mad scientists or models on the catwalk. Their videos are a savage pastiche of images taken from museums or off the streets, from the present or from the past, in a hybrid where Kim Kardashian coexists with Michelangelo’s David. 

Transforming danger into an opportunity: this is what the Portuguese designer Alves Ludovico did with sugar. Born in Lisbon, in the countryside, where his family’s artisan workshops were his playground as a child, he discovered he was diabetic early on in life. But this quickly became a challenge: instead of seeing sugar as a harmful element, he turned it into a key constructive element in his design practice.

So, thanks to a laser sintering process, he created a sugar-based bioplastic called the hyper-glycemia polymer with which he makes amazing objects: from his super-sweet chairs to sculptures part of the Anthropocorallius series, in which Alves combines the magical realism of his design imagination with the mundane realism of his condition. His sculptures may be touched, caressed, scratched and licked, thereby inviting the viewer to experience new ways of interacting with objects.

Among the strangest and most surprising works in his collections we find Sugar O’Clock – a bizarre hybrid between a clock and cow udders – or the sugar piglet that may be used as an amusing candlestick. Poised between design and sculpture, Alves’s practice strives to problematically pinpoint the economic, social and cultural issues related to sugar consumption, according to a vision for which design may lead people to think about, reflect upon and develop improved decision-making skills. “If every diabetic in the world,” Alves loves repeating, “would come together in a single country, this hypothetical Diabetìa would be the third largest nation, after China and India”. Just to gauge the quantitative dimension of the people potentially interested in his work, his creations and his provocations.

A multipurpose object to furnish a minimal living space: those tiny houses measuring a little over 10 m2 (the so-called chambres de bonne, or servants’ chambers), built in the attics of early 19th-century Parisian homes, today oftentimes occupied by students. Giuseppe Arezzi – Sicilian by birth, Milanese by choice – designed Binomio (edited by It’s Great Design by Margherita Ratti in Paris) precisely for this space, as the prototype of hybrid furnishing, with three shelves at three heights: it can turn into a desk or a dresser, but it can also be used for hanging clothes, or as a bench, a small table and even a kneeling-stool.

Both rigorous and visionary, with a design approach deriving from careful social-anthropological analysis, Arezzi belongs to that generation of designers who re-explore ancient craftsmanship traditions in order to offer innovative solutions to the needs of contemporaneity.