When can a working environment be considered sustainable? With the famous Frankfurt Kitchen, Austrian designer Margarete “Grete” Schütte-Lihotzky rethinks the kitchen – which in the 1920s was a “woman-only space” – as an efficient “workshop for the housewife”. To optimise the user-friendliness of the workspace, Schütte-Lihotzky takes an ethnographic approach, interviewing women and documenting their movements and time spent in the kitchen. This user-centred project ante litteram inaugurates a vision of design that is not normative or dogmatic but at the service of the end user’s needs. A forerunner of the modular kitchen, the Frankfurter Küche obtained great commercial success also due to its deliberately affordable price.

The communist designer Enzo Mari did not resort to the lexicon of sustainability to define his Autoprogettazione, a DIY instruction manual aimed at rethinking the possibilities of production in a capitalist ecosystem. Yet the humanist vision that characterises these instructions for use anticipates by forty years the sustainable way to design. By making it possible to source materials from local producers, Mari counteracts the perverse effects of a global production chain. By eliminating intermediaries, he decreases the environmental impact. By limiting decorative interventions, he updates the canon of beauty to an essential, honest simplicity of use, while making room for experimentation and the whims of the end user, put back at the centre of the process not only in terms of familiarity with the material and technique but also with how the production process works.

The terrazzo texture has become a classic for all those pieces of furniture and claddings that turn different recyclable materials into a colourful mix with which to shape the artefacts of our everyday life. Before the dispersion and accumulation of plastic in the seas became sadly part of our everyday life, British designer Jane Atfield had already anticipated the opportunity to reuse plastic to create furniture. In the case of RCP2, the waste material comes from detergent bottles. Once shredded, the plastic is heated and then pressed to obtain panels which, suitably cut, allows this simple chair to be easily assembled. Atfield’s intuition is not limited to creating the first recycled plastic chair, but also to its production chain – stored in community collection centres, the bottles were recovered by Made of Waste, the brand founded by Atfield herself to promote the use of recycled materials.

Recycling was one of the great design currents of the 1990s, and the You cannot lay down your memory chest of drawers by Tejo Remy is perhaps its most significant and iconic example. Deliberately crooked, the imperfect and only apparently precarious structure allows for the combination of different types of drawers, encouraging improvisation and the recovery of what is already available. In addition to extending the life cycle of objects apparently doomed to be disposed of, You cannot lay down your memories mixes irony and sentimentality – each drawer is a box of memories of its previous lives, but also a stimulus to remember what is placed in each container.

Can we be sustainable, even in the grave? With Capsula Mundi, Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel create a virtuous and poetic device for rethinking the disposal of our bodies after we die. Instead of the classic coffin, whose components are not just wood but also plastic and metal – materials that are difficult to degrade - Capsula Mundi is an organic shell in which to place the remains or ashes of the deceased. Placed in the soil like a seed, the capsule attaches itself to a new tree that is planted on it and to which it offers itself as fertiliser. In this new symbiosis, a new life cycle is activated after death, while the tree takes on the value of a tomb integrated into the landscape and nature.

With Local River, French designer Mathieu Lehanneur rethinks the nature of the aquarium, here turned into a new tool to breed freshwater fish and grow vegetables. The system applies the principles of hydroponics on a small scale – the biological waste produced by the fish, rich in nitrate, nourishes the plants placed in the upper herbaria, promoting their growth without the use of exogenous fertilisers. The “refrigerator-aquarium”, as Lehanneur called it, anticipates multispeciesism in the domestic environment by at least a decade, and while retaining its decorative function, it could allow people to produce their own food at home, even in small flats.

Solar Sinter is a device designed to use a material – sand – where it is extremely abundant – the desert – to create everyday objects with a very low impact thanks to solar technology. The result of this ultra-short-circuit micro-production chain is a 3D-printed glass object that doesn’t need high-temperature ovens thanks to a Fresnel lens capable of generating temperatures between 1400 and 1600 degrees. An experimental machine suitable for very small-scale production, Solar Sinter is an invitation and a wish to experiment with the integration of solar technologies in the design and production of objects.

Caused by rising temperatures and increasing ocean acidification, the dramatic disappearance of corals plagues tropical seas and endangers the survival of coral reefs. A timely solution to restore them has been developed by Alex Goad, an Australian designer and researcher. With his MARS, an acronym for Modular Artificial Reef Structure, Goad has designed a modular 3D-printed ceramic system that provides corals with a skeleton on which to grow. The geometric structure serves as a surrogate habitat for marine species, promoting their settlement and reproduction.

Israeli-American Neri Oxman, the inventor of Material Ecology, is undoubtedly the person who has contributed the most to rethinking the limits of design through the opportunities provided by the synthesis of design and bioengineering. From MIT in Boston, where she teaches and directs the Mediated Matter research group, she studies and experiments with biological materials designed to collaborate with our anthropomorphic environment, effectively erasing the boundaries between the built and living worlds. The appeal of Oxman’s works lies not only in their technical advancedness but also in the imagery – for the more conservative certainly dystopian – of their aesthetics. This is the case with Otaared, a branched exoskeleton inspired by Mercury’s flights and designed to envelop and protect the body. Inside, the exoskeleton contains calcified bacteria with which to grow, almost like new prostheses for flights, real bone structures.

Regenerating nature is a theme that designers are increasingly dealing with. Among them, bio designers have a decidedly secular approach. What if we did not let nature take its course, but rather helped it restore itself by designing new species? Modelled on fungi, bacteria, invertebrates and mammals, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new species replace organisms that are now extinct, offering themselves as a protective shield against diseases, pollution or invasive species.