Industrial cooperation for sustainability

Outdoor mobile kitchen island, lighting product line made of wool felt, furniture for device sharing and many diverse product ideas are being developed in the third design LAB programme. During the almost six-month collaboration, the designer-manufacturer duos all brought projects to life that are exciting, placed special emphasis on sustainability and innovation, and are expected to stand their ground not only in the domestic but the international market as well.

The Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency launched the design LAB incubational program for the third time now, which aims to facilitate cooperation between Hungarian manufacturers and product designers. Thanks to the current program, six designer-manufacturer duos can realise their winning entries. During the collaboration, the duos combine their experiences, technologies used, and unique styles, while focusing on environmental sustainability. As a responsible organisation, the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency, beyond realising its strategic goals, puts special emphasis on sustainability as one of the biggest challenges of our era. The Agency enriches the programs it organises or coordinates with many green elements to call the profession’s and wide audience’s attention to the importance of the topic.

Art Innova Ltd. and Dr Norbert Vasváry-Nádor designer recycle carpentry industrial by-products in the APPACK project. In their collaboration, they aimed to develop a piece of furniture for device sharing which is suitable for storing, for instance, official documents, objects, or even packages and sharing them with others in a contactless manner. During manufacturing, they work with chipboards made of carpentry industrial by-products.

The cooperation of Concrazy Ltd. and Sára Kele resulted in the REPETA product line, which offers a collection of interior design objects made of concrete for catering establishments. The objects’ structure, patterns, and use of materials suggest a kind of repetitive activity which characterises circularity: they crush scrap concrete elements, giving them an entirely new life, and calling attention to the importance of circularity.

Faktum Bútor Ltd. and Máté Horváth create a group of products functioning as an innovative baby room called Shape project. The collaboration’s basic concept is to use plywood sheets that are curved at certain edges of the furniture, which have the same radius for economic manufacturability. During the collaboration, they use FSC-certified materials while putting sustainability in the centre by designing for long life and flat packing.

The result of the collaboration between Gránit és Márvány Ltd. and Espiritu Consulting Ltd. (Bettina Bessenyei designer), Shango Outdoor Cooking project aims to create outdoor cooking opportunities that reduce environmental impact by using renewable energy sources. When creating the mobile kitchen island, they use scraps or waste from the processing and cutting of grès ceramic tiles and natural stone. Keeping sustainability in mind, an important aspect was creating a smooth cooking surface that is free of perforations or surface-breaking elements, providing easier cleaning and therefore less use of chemicals.

The joint project of Kárpitos Partner Group LP. and IO Line And Round Ltd. (Annabella Hevesi designer) is an upholstered chair, the PEACH Easy Chair designed for domestic and public use. The chairs feature jewel-like 3D-printed metal shapes that achieve the desired ergonomic effect by mechanically distorting the sponge – rather than by cutting to shape, glueing or casting. During creation, it is of fundamental importance to develop structures and structural joints that allow for separable waste management at the end of the product's life cycle.

Multifelt Factory Ltd. and Co & Co Designcommunication Ltd. (Márton Budai designer) create the KILIM touch lamp line. An ancient natural material, wool felt, plays a key role in its production. Creating this material is the least environmentally polluting in the textile industry, they use sheepskin for this process. Only water, steam and heat are needed for manufacturing the product, and the felt waste from the production process can be recycled.