Contact
menu
Contact
menu
Caption: "Something I appreciate about VOLA is the slow pace of the development process, design choices and product launches. There's a thoughtfulness instead of a focus on selling as much as possible right now," says Linda Nhu Laursen.
By Louise Witt
”My goal is for design to be long-term – designed to last.”
These are the words of Linda Nhu Laursen, Head of Research at Aalborg University’s Design Lab. She trained as a designer at Aalborg University in the mid-2000s. She returned to the university in the role of researcher and teacher because she, as a recent graduate, experienced “a huge loss of meaning” in her profession.
“I was given assignments to design furniture with a short lifespan. I couldn’t see the idea of designing yet another coffee table when I had just finished one. It’s commercial thinking, but what good does it do to people and the planet?” she asks.
“I said to myself: I must change the next generation of designers. When they graduate, they will design hundreds or thousands of products for the rest of their lives, and if I can have even the smallest impact on these young designers, it can mean a big difference to the world. Ultimately, I also think that companies will benefit from it,” Linda Nhu Laursen points out.
As a researcher and professor, she is passionate about setting a new agenda for future designers that is inspiring and positive rather than negative and filled with blame.
As a part of her classes, the students are assigned to dissemble a product, e.g. a coffee machine. The assignment is to investigate how it typically breaks and then redesign it, so that it is easier to repair in the future and ultimately give the product a longer lifespan. When the students design something completely new, she always challenges them to take the longevity of the design into consideration: “Will this design be passed down? Inherited?” she asks.
“Right now, a short lifespan has become the norm for a lot of designs, that ought to have a long lifespan, such as for instance furniture and buildings,” says Linda Nhu Laursen.
In other product categories, we could, on the other hand, lower our expectations regarding the lifespan of the products, she says.
“There will still be a need for luxury items. We just need to figure out how to combine a good life and a sustainable life. For example, one of my students designed confetti from dried flowers that the flower industry had in surplus. Flowers that would have otherwise been discarded,” she says.
Linda Nhu Laursen is convinced that the future lies in close interaction between businesses and design schools – just as it did in the 1950s, the golden age of Danish design with names like Arne Jacobsen, Børge Mogensen and Hans J. Wegner. Back then, the human body was the main focus for functional design; now the focus is all about the planet in a possible green golden age for Danish design, she remarks.
Through research projects such as “ReshapeWaste” and “ZeroWaste”, funded by the Danish Industry Foundation, she and her colleagues have helped hundreds of companies identify their waste – and matched them with designers who have been challenged to unlock the potential of the surplus. For example, one company had dented aluminum acoustic panels returned: Now, due to an idea from designer Mikkel Huse, the damaged panels are embossed with a natural wavy interference pattern, so that the differing surface look becomes a positive aspect rather than a negative flaw. Another example is discarded pieces of wood with knots, which the designers Line Frier and Mikkel Bahr from Friis & Moltke have given new life in a door design showcasing the discarded knots as the door’s characteristics.
Linda Nhu Laursen and her colleagues have been collecting the most important experiences from the many collaborations in an inspirational book containing analysis forms and cases: It is called “Reshaping Resources” and is published by Lindhardt and Ringhof.
"We shouldn't call these materials waste and residual materials, but rather resources. The ability to see the potential of such resources is amazing - we need to reintroduce that into design," says the professor.
Your focus is on optimizing what is in surplus, but did you consider the possibility that we could also completely change the way we produce things?
“Yes, I have a dream that we will stop using virgin materials. Today we are accustomed to using homogeneous materials and producing homogeneous products, and waste material is an obstacle. My goal is to be able to scale up production with diverse materials. That companies receive heterogeneous, flawed, strange materials and figure out how to transform these materials into something that people desire, so that we won't have to constantly order new lumber from China in a certain thickness and size. My ambition is that we can work methodically with diversity in materials. If these acoustic panels and doors with knots and grain differences lead to additional sales, the companies will start to accept this way of thinking. My aim is to show that you can make premium products from discarded materials. We just need even better design skills,” states Linda Nhu Laursen.
Inspired by her conversations with her own children, schoolchildren have also become an important focus for Linda Nhu Laursen. Together with the Spar Nord Foundation, she has held so-called “Repair Camps” for approximately 1,000 younger students so far – and she has applied for funding for even more camps.
Among other things, the children have disassembled their own broken computer mice to learn how to repair them, or they have patched their worn clothes in creative ways. It is important to be educated as a democratic citizen, but just as important to be a skilled and self-confident craftsman or woman in one’s own life, believes Linda Nhu Laursen.
“Our children have heard enough about climate changes. It is not their fault, and we should not criticize and lecture them anymore. We should give them the competence to act and teach them a new behavior,” she says.
“A lot of products disempower us. Often the schoolchildren have brought things that are not designed to be opened and repaired, for example a mobile phone charger with a glued joint. I always say: The products are stupid, not the children! I hope that in the future they will tell their parents: We shouldn't buy a product like that, because it has a glued joint,” she says.
However, Linda Nhu Laursen has also been thrilled to see children being proud of themselves:
“I don't think many children remember having solved a math problem, but the girl who repaired her father's walkie-talkie will never forget: Now she is a child who has repaired a walkie-talkie.”
Repairing things makes you develop a different emotional attachment to these things, Linda Nhu Laursen points out. She hopes that this feeling can be a catalyst for taking more and better care of things and discarding today’s consumerist throw away culture.
