easy to transport tablets and recover their shape with water

Contemporary furniture design is not just an Ikea thing and can be understood as a crossroads between materials science, architectural research, functionality and art. This is demonstrated by concepts such as Kitchen for Life, modular kitchens designed in Spain, or panels made with waste from corn cultivation to cover walls and furniture.

The best showcase to check the state of affairs at a global level has been Milan Design Week 2024, held in mid-April. There, at the most important international event in the sector, all kinds of proposals have been seen, with 2,000 exhibitors and more than 300,000 visitors. One of the most striking has undoubtedly been that of the University of Art and Design of Lausanne (ECAL), a series of furniture and objects made with cellulose sponge, a bioderived and biodegradable material.

This collection, called Under Pressure Solutions (UPS), is part of a long research by industrial design students and professors to minimize the environmental impact of the sector and optimize furniture transport as much as possible. And they achieve this thanks to the properties of the material, which can be transported compressed in thin sheets but which, after being moistened with water, expands to transform without mechanical assembly into functional elements such as stools, tables or ladders capable of supporting the weight of objects and people.

Origin of the idea

During the 2018 Milan Furniture Fair, students of the ECAL Master in Product Design proposed a series of everyday objects, manufactured on site by 3D printers in the exhibition facilities. Attendees could buy them directly on the go or online, which could relocate production and save huge amounts of CO2 in the transportation of products, minimizing logistics as much as possible. However, until 3D printing capabilities improve, solutions to reduce or compact furniture before assembly are necessary.

The idea of ​​optimizing furniture packaging is not new, as those responsible for ECAL point out on the project website. As far back as 1859, the Austrian cabinetmaker Michael Thonet already thought about it, developing a curved wood technique for his famous Chair No. 14which could be mass-produced in pieces, allowing up to 36 disassembled chairs to be stored in 1 cubic meter.

The person who made the most progress in this sense was the designer Gaetano Pesce with his iconic UP5 armchair, also known as La Mamma or Big Mamma. In 1969, Pesce presented this piece of furniture that he marked a before and after thanks to the polyurethane foam with freon gas with which it was made. Thus, he could be vacuum packed to occupy a tenth of its volume and it acquired its final shape in just a few minutes after opening the package in which it was transported.

Based on these inspirations, those responsible for ECAL decided investigate compressible materials and the possibilities they offered to simplify the logistics of the sector. This is how they found the cellulose sponge and its properties, which allow furniture designed with this material to expand and reconfigure once moistened.

Different phases

Before reaching that conclusion, industrial designers Anniina Koivu, Christophe Guberan and Camille Blin asked the students of the Master in Product Design an exhaustive investigation into materials that could be compressed to take up less space. The 150 elements identified in that initial phase They had to be evaluated around three basic criteria: compressibility, organicity and “feelability”, that is, its ability to become a seat comfortable enough for a future user.

To classify all the materials in detail, the students drew a 3D cartography to be able to easily and intuitively identify the most suitable ones to achieve the desired result. Little by little, they left behind the least suitable ones, reducing the list to 56 candidates, some as exotic as granulated jam, latex and castor foam or nitinola shape memory nickel-titanium alloy.

After examining their properties and possible uses, they continued discarding materials until they were left with 10, to choose the most appropriate one to work on in depth. The next step, in August 2022, was experiment with each of them until there were only 3 left for carrying out comprehensive tests and more advanced prototypes: cork, cellulose sponge and enkair, a thermoplastic elastomeric material that is already being used to replace foam in various markets, such as mattresses.

After various tests and the manufacturing of the first prototypes, the research team concluded that the most accessible and effective element to achieve its objective was the assembled dry sponge plates. This plant-based material, which expands up to 10 times its size upon contact with water, is made from wood fibers, making it ecological and highly respectful of the environment, both due to its biodegradable capacity and a process very low-polluting production.

Once selected, industrial designers Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel and Julie Richoz proposed different seat designs made from cellulose sponge, with several priorities in mind: an efficient production process, a design that would facilitate expansion and minimize the amount of water needed and, very important, shorten the drying phase.

Thus they established a final prototype of a basic stool, the one that best meets all the requirements, but throughout the process, all kinds of ideas emerged for different furniture and decorative objects, as could be seen at its stand at the Milan Fair. There you could see everything from coffee tables to chairs, the ones most likely to ever reach production, but also bowls, trash cans, shelves and even ceiling lamps.