The previous text argued that the design industry had lost its sense of direction. But that is not the full truth. Several directions are being pursued today, all with energy and conviction.
One begins with virtue. It argues that a product is relevant because it is made from responsible materials, processes and systems.
Another begins with nostalgia. It returns to objects that once meant something and brings them back to life in the hope that they might mean something again.
Both play it safe, and safe is a dangerous place for design.
A third direction is more daring and seems genuinely capable of producing something unseen. Craft, collectible design and the work supported by galleries form an ecosystem willing to place bets on avant-garde work. But that freedom depends on scarcity, patronage and small scale. It may incubate the future, but can it distribute it widely enough to become the future of design?
For all their differences, these directions begin with furniture typologies as we already understand them. One brings an old chair back to life, another justifies why and how it is made, and a third frees its form from the constraints of utility, production and scale.
This text examines what these directions promise and why I am concerned that they are false starts.
By false start, I do not mean a foolish or worthless direction. I mean an answer that recognises something real, but becomes mistaken for a complete route into the future.
Before diving in, I should say that some of this may sound like a disgruntled furniture manufacturer complaining. But those who know me know that I am a genuine optimist. I point to these popular but ultimately insufficient directions because I believe they reveal an opening; what if the next chapter for design is not another chair, table or sofa? What if it creates genuinely new categories in response to new behaviours?
The first three directions begin with an object and search for a reason for it to exist. The alternative begins earlier: with a change in life, and the question of what form—if any—should follow.
Beginning with changes in how life is lived and allowing the object to follow has produced real futures before, although with varied commercial success. We will look at those examples too, and at what went right and what went wrong.
Here we go.
False start 1: Borrowed provenance
An object can enter the world twice.
The first time, there is no telling whether it will be meaningful. Its meaning must be built through use, attention and time.
The second time, the designer has a biography. The photographs exist. Museums, collectors and historians have already done the work. Somebody cared about it before we did.
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An object can enter the world twice.
The first time, there is no telling whether it will be meaningful. Its meaning must be built through use, attention and time.
The second time, the designer has a biography. The photographs exist. Museums, collectors and historians have already done the work. Somebody cared about it before we did.
A reissue brings back more than a form. It brings back provenance: authorship, historical placement, institutional recognition and the rose-tinted glow of another time.
Archives have become active product pipelines because historical validation is a powerful advantage in a market where new objects struggle to explain why they should exist at all. The reissue begins with an extraordinary claim: this already mattered once, and so it will matter again.
For many design businesses, the archive has become more than a supplement to new development. It is now perhaps the industry's most common operating model. GUBI and &Tradition have built substantial parts of their catalogues around twentieth-century reissues. Knoll continues to return designs by Mies van der Rohe, Harry Bertoia and Charles Pollock to production. HAY works with Ahrend on designs by Friso Kramer and Wim Rietveld. Cassina's iMaestri collection has made the systematic re-edition of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Gerrit Rietveld and others an institution in itself. Vitra and Herman Miller keep reissuing the legacies of the Eames and Jean Prouvé.
These projects are not equivalent. At their best, old designs are brought back lovingly: with heirs, foundations or original manufacturers involved; with serious research and technical development; and with the intention of keeping the object in production long enough to form another life. Elsewhere, the famous name and archival photography become launch assets. The object is extracted from a legacy, promoted for a season and quietly removed when attention moves on. Stewardship preserves an object. Opportunism only borrows its authority.
Some of the results are excellent. What interests me is why we seem to need them so badly now.
The chair I already loved
For the record, I’ve indulged in this myself. In 2024, Hem reintroduced the Experiment Chair by the Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro. I had loved the chair since I first encountered it as a design student. It is rebellious and unmistakably postmodern. But coming from a renegade Finn whose context was Artek, black, white and beech, and a traditional northern society close to nature, it feels almost obscene.
Bringing it back did not feel like looking back. Working with 90-year-old Yrjö, his daughter Isa and her husband Henrik as well as his grand-daughter Ida allowed us to make an extraordinary object available again and gave the project a living connection to its author.
The Experiment Chair arrived with advantages a new product could never possess: four decades of context, an established place in its designer’s body of work and extraordinary archival material. We could explain why it mattered because part of that meaning had already been made.
The past arrives already edited
It would be easy to call the attraction nostalgia, but a familiar form is not necessarily a retreat. An apparently old-fashioned object could contain new relationships to production, ownership, repair or use. Culture does not advance through a clean sequence of visual languages. There is also a flipside to this argument: novelty for its own sake does not create consequential change. It provides a short-lived thrill, especially in the age of social media.
What we desire may not be the past itself, but the certainty we associate with it. Time removes noise. Institutions, markets and collectors preserve a small number of objects and allow their meanings to become stable. We forget the thousands of mediocre chairs surrounding the one that remains.
The past arrives already approved, and it gives us a sense of safety. Investments are easier to justify, PR success is almost guaranteed, and the sales teams already have their pitches prepared for them.
The false start is not the act of reissuing. It is believing that meaning accumulated in one historical condition can answer the uncertainty of another.
We can reproduce the dimensions, but we cannot reproduce the moment.
Reissuing the past can feel like putting on your grandfather's clothes. The cut may still be magnificent, and there is excitement in briefly inhabiting his silhouette. But the clothes cannot reproduce the life that gave them meaning. Without new conditions of our own, we are not continuing history. We are role-playing it.
False start 2: The virtuous chair
If borrowed provenance tries to ride on meaning from the past, the virtuous chair tries to establish meaning in advance.
The ecological crisis has made materials, labour, energy, repair and disposal inseparable from design. The industry's response, from recycled materials and replaceable parts to take-back programmes and circular systems, is necessary and often difficult.
The examples are now everywhere. Humanscale calls Path “the world’s most sustainable task chair” and translates each chair into kilograms of emissions reduced, gallons of water saved and pounds of ocean plastic upcycled. TAKT extends this logic into an entire system: its Cross Chair is eco-certified, made for disassembly and repair, and flat-packed so that five to seven times as many chairs fit into the same shipping volume. Fritz Hansen’s N02 Recycle begins with upcycled household plastic that can be recycled again.
These are serious efforts, not punchlines. They involve material research, supply chains and industrial risk. But the language surrounding them reveals how comfortable the industry has become with a particular form of proof: percentages, declarations, certifications and circular diagrams. The score is available before the experience.
The problem begins when virtue becomes the complete proposition. The object arrives carrying evidence that it has behaved responsibly before anyone has asked whether it is desirable, whether it brings anything new to the table or whether it is worth keeping.
The product can satisfy the brief and still fail culturally. It may be correct in every declared attribute and remain inert as an object. Its moral argument explains why it is less bad to produce, but not why it should enter the world.
Virtue becomes another kind of provenance. Instead of borrowing validation from history, the object borrows it from a certification, a material story or a diagram. Meaning is declared before use.
When desire wins
Max Lamb has carved expanded polystyrene and covered it in polyurethane rubber. Sabine Marcelis built a language around cast resin, glass and light. Faye Toogood's Roly Poly emerged as a fibreglass shell. None of these materials provides an easy sustainability story.
Yet to me, their work felt more relevant than many products developed to score highly against every responsible metric. Not because environmental questions did not matter, but because the objects began somewhere else: with intrinsic motivation, material curiosity and forms only their authors would have made.
The attraction survived every objection.
But that sentence is highly dangerous if it becomes permission to ignore the consequence. It should instead expose what a sustainability score cannot measure. An object can be technically defensible and culturally dead. Another can be materially compromised and still alter what people desire and what the industry believes is possible.
The task is not to choose between consequence and relevance, but to demand both from the same object.
Correct is not complete
An object that nobody wants, keeps, repairs or passes on has not solved the problem simply because its material can theoretically circulate. Longevity is technical, but it is also emotional and cultural.
This does not absolve designers or companies from improving materials, labour, repair or end-of-life systems. Nor does beauty excuse an indefensible chain of extraction and waste. The object needs a system that deserves to continue and a form that people want to continue with.
My argument is that a circular model around an unconvincing object remains organised around something nobody particularly wants. The diagram can prove that the object may have several lives. It cannot make anyone care about the first one.
A virtuous chair can resemble a Barbie (or Ken): immaculate, perfectly proportioned and correct on every measurable score. Then the trousers come down and there is nothing between the legs. The scorecard has described the body and missed the life.
False start 3: The protected experiment
Craft can keep design, material knowledge, judgement and production close together. It allows an object to remain unresolved while the designer discovers what it might become.
Design galleries protect that relationship better than most institutions in the industry. I should be clear here; I am deeply fond of what they are doing. They place serious bets on unusual work before its significance has been confirmed and without requiring every idea to survive the economics of industrial production.
Friedman Benda, Galerie kreo and Salon 94 Design have demonstrated what sustained commitment to experimental design can produce. They give designers the time, production support and serious critical context required to develop work that would struggle to emerge from a conventional product brief. Salon 94 Design has been particularly effective at dissolving the boundaries between furniture, art, fashion and performance. Etage Projects in Copenhagen has done something equally important on a smaller scale, supporting practices such as Sabine Marcelis and Objects of Common Interest.
Uppercut Space in Antwerp shows what a new progressive gallery can do. Its programme brings forward emerging designers like Soft Baroque and LS Gomma – distinct voices and work that does not always resemble furniture as the wider industry understands it. That is precisely its value. Uppercut is not merely selling expensive objects. It is helping design recover its capacity to surprise.
But there is a limit to what this scene can do, and sometimes its inherent exclusivity becomes almost theatrical. Some of the most adventurous objects in design sit under spotlights with extraordinary prices while privileged collectors mingle over champagne. I genuinely have nothing against the price points (or the champagne); they may be what allows the work to exist. But the same conditions that protect the experiment also separate it from ordinary life.
Craft and collectible design may incubate the future, but they have rarely been good at carrying it from the gallery into production. The qualities that made the objects exciting to begin with, surprising shapes, tactility, near-impossible construction and intense manual craft, do not readily translate into industrialised production.
A future available only through the Design Miami VIP room is not a future. It is an artefact and a collectible. So far, design brands have struggled to turn culturally significant gallery work into mass-produced successes, though there are exceptions: Faye Toogood’s Roly Poly for Driade and Ron Arad’s Big Easy for Moroso show that the crossing is possible.
The shared assumption
Borrowed provenance, the virtuous chair and collectible design appear to point in different directions. One looks backwards. Another tries to correct the conditions of the present. The third protects formal and material freedom from the demands of industry.
Beneath their differences lies a shared assumption. Each remains organised around the object. Provenance gives it historical authority. Virtue gives it moral and technical proof. Collectible design gives it freedom from industrial constraint. All three can produce meaningful work, but none necessarily begins with the more fundamental question: what has changed in life, and does that change require an object at all?
The industry has become highly sophisticated at asking how an object should be revived, improved or liberated. It is less comfortable asking whether an object is needed, or what response the present might actually require.
This is why the problem cannot be resolved by choosing one direction, or combining their best qualities. They remain answers supplied by the object rather than questions posed by changing life.
When life comes first
To understand the alternative, it is useful to return to earlier moments when furniture did not begin with furniture. Not to retrieve their forms, but to understand how those forms came into existence.
In the early 1960s, Robert Propst began studying how people worked. As head of the newly established Herman Miller Research Corporation, his task was not to design another desk, but to investigate the office as a changing human environment.
Existing offices had been created for a way of life that was already disappearing. Work involved movement, communication, concentration and continual adjustment, yet the physical environment remained fixed. Action Office emerged from this discrepancy as a system that could be reconfigured as work changed.
The name contains the idea. Action came before office furniture.
Its enormous influence also provides a warning. Action Office was copied and simplified until an attempt to make work more adaptable became the generic cubicle. The proposition survived, but much of its intelligence was flattened by the system that distributed it. Recognising a new behaviour is not enough. The object must retain that recognition as it travels through industry.
Joe Colombo began with a different verb: inhabiting.
His Minikitchen of 1963 compressed burners, refrigeration, preparation and storage into a mobile unit that could be closed and moved. His later Rotoliving and Total Furnishing Unit dissolved the boundaries between furniture, appliance and room. Sleeping, cooking, working, storing and entertaining were organised as changing activities rather than assigned permanently to separate objects and spaces.
Colombo's proposals were futuristic, sometimes implausible and deeply invested in the plastics of their time. But they did not ask what the next table or cabinet should look like. They began with the possibility that urban life might become smaller, more mobile and less dependent on rooms with fixed functions.
Three decades later, Snowcrash responded to another changing condition.
The Nordic countries of the 1990s were emerging as centres of mobile communication and digital technology. In an exchange for this text, Snowcrash co-founder Ilkka Suppanen recalled that mobile phones had entered everyday life, designers had begun working with computers and the internet was emerging. Yet the furniture industry seemed largely disconnected from the transformation. It was, he said, "still producing more or less the same categories of objects" for a world changing around it.
Snowcrash did not begin from a theory or a completely clean slate. Its young designers already had products, prototypes and ideas, and spent much of their time together working, playing and talking. But they were consciously looking at the life emerging around the digital revolution and asking whether it required entirely different kinds of objects. Furniture became game-like. Familiar typologies no longer felt particularly compelling.
The break with Scandinavian design was deliberate. Suppanen remembers its inherited language as "almost like a prison." Snowcrash avoided wood, embraced synthetic materials and refused the idea that Finnish designers should work in an expected way. Looking back, he sees a paradox: aesthetically, Snowcrash rejected Scandinavian modernism, yet its belief that design should respond to contemporary society through the materials and technologies of its own time may have placed it closer to modernism's original spirit than the nostalgic work surrounding it.
The Netsurfer computer divan captured both Snowcrash's prescience and its limits. It recognised the right verb: computing was entering everyday life and changing how and where people worked and communicated. But it gave that behaviour a form based on the technology visible at the time, when the computer was still a large box. The desktop became a laptop, then dissolved into phones and tablets. The behaviour continued while the technological object disappeared. As Suppanen puts it, "We understood the direction of change better than we understood the exact technological destination."
Snowcrash attracted extraordinary attention but survived only a few years. Suppanen resists the easy conclusion that it simply arrived too early, and corrects another: Snowcrash did not lack financing. It had considerable backing through Proventus. What it lacked was the right combination of strategic direction, management, industrial competence, production, distribution, decision-making and patience. Many of these elements existed individually, but never cohered into an organisation capable of carrying the ideas into the world. "Building the organisation capable of carrying the ideas was perhaps an even more difficult design problem than designing the products themselves," he writes.
As discussed in the previous text, a new typology can recognise a real change and still fail if the organisation cannot carry it into the world. Cultural prescience and commercial viability do not necessarily appear at the same time. Nor does recognising the right behaviour necessarily lead to the right object.
The right question can still produce the wrong answer
One Nordic, the furniture brand I co-founded with Joel Roos and Stefan Mahlberg, also began with a real change in behaviour. The original insight was Joel's. His family had run a high-end furniture store in Helsinki for decades. He watched customers visit, browse and experience the furniture, then leave and buy it for less from one of the new European e-commerce sites. The store was doing the work while the transaction moved online.
Joel understood that e-commerce would not merely become another sales channel. It would fundamentally change how furniture was bought. We believed it would also change what furniture needed to be.
If premium furniture was going to travel through e-commerce, it needed to survive parcel logistics, fit into a compact box and be assembled at home without tools. We developed chairs that folded for shipping and products with ingenious assembly systems. These were genuine innovations driven by a new way of shopping.
In our 2014 manifesto, we promised to "revolutionize how people buy furniture, one easy-assembled package at a time." Looking back, that sentence contains both the insight and the error.
Much of the flat-pack problem had already been solved by IKEA and others. Our clever assemblies often became gimmicks rather than sources of enduring value. Flat-packed construction was more vulnerable to wear and sat uneasily with premium furniture intended for demanding contract environments.
I remain proud of the products we developed. Most One Nordic designs are still produced and sold by Hem, and several have become classics in the collection. What survived were the qualities also named in the manifesto: functional excellence, surprising practicality and original aesthetics. It is nevertheless difficult to ignore that the versions sold today retain almost none of the clever assembly systems around which they were originally conceived.
The designs outlived the thesis.
Recognising a real change does not guarantee a lasting response. We understood that shopping was moving online, but designed too directly for the box through which the furniture travelled. E-commerce changed the transaction more profoundly than it changed the object.
Not nouns, but verbs
The dominant directions in design begin with nouns: the chair to revive, the sofa to correct, the table to liberate. The examples above began elsewhere. Propst began with working, Colombo with inhabiting, Snowcrash with connecting and One Nordic with buying. Perhaps the future of design begins not with nouns, but with verbs.
The difficult question is not whether behaviour is changing. It always is. Sometimes a new behaviour creates a new typology. Sometimes it changes how we use an existing one. We work on sofas, communicate from bed and hold meetings while walking. The difficult question is which new behaviours are physical and permanent enough to demand new objects, and which will merely pass through the ones we already have.
A verb does not reveal whether a behaviour will endure or what physical form, if any, it requires. The object does not simply follow. It remains a proposition made under conditions of unavoidable uncertainty.
Beginning with a verb does not guarantee the right object. It simply gives design a better question.
These projects should not become another archive from which to borrow. Their materials, forms and visions belong to their moments. What we can learn is the direction in which they looked.
Our own period is hardly short of change. Yet remarkably few objects feel as though they could only have emerged from the way we live now. Instead of finding forms for the present, we keep reinventing the past.
The risk worth taking
The argument of this text is not that we should stop reissuing important objects, abandon responsible materials or dismiss the freedom of collectible design. All three directions can produce worthwhile work. What they cannot do by themselves is tell us what purpose design should serve now.
Borrowed provenance begins with an answer supplied by history. Virtue begins with proof that the object has behaved correctly. Collectible design begins with freedom from the constraints of scale. Each may improve, revive or liberate the objects we already know. None necessarily asks whether those objects are still adequate responses to the way life is changing.
Propst began with working. Colombo began with inhabiting. Snowcrash began with connecting. One Nordic began with buying. Their successes and failures point to the same lesson: beginning with a verb does not guarantee the right object. The behaviour may not endure. The form may be wrong. The organisation may fail to carry the idea into the world.
The task is therefore more demanding than spotting change. It is to distinguish a lasting physical shift from a passing commercial fashion; to understand whether it requires a new object at all; and, if it does, to give it a form that can survive production, distribution and use without losing the insight that produced it.
This is why the truly new object has no telltale sign. It arrives without historical authority, a reassuring scorecard or a gallery spotlight. It may look foolish because the category that will explain it does not yet exist.
A new direction begins when design responds to a change in life before its meaning is settled and before the answer is obvious. It will produce failures. It may also produce objects that could only have emerged from this moment. Whether any of those objects come to represent their time depends on what happens next: who takes the risk, builds the production and distribution, and keeps the idea alive long enough for culture to notice.
There has never been a better time to start a business, and there have never been more design businesses. Yet for all this entrepreneurial activity, too few are pursuing genuinely brave directions in design. Breaking new ground is riskier than sticking to proven formulas. But it is a risk worth taking.
Postscript: A few more false starts
One Nordic was not unique. The industry repeatedly recognises a real change in behaviour or need, then translates it into an answer too narrow, too literal or too commercially convenient to define a lasting future.
- Ergonomics. Sedentary work causes physical harm. The assumption was that a better chair could solve it. The result was a more comfortable way to remain sedentary, rather than a workplace designed around the human need to move.
- The activity-based office. Work became mobile, collaborative and varied. The assumption was that these behaviours could be standardised into zones and furniture packages. The result was a new catalogue, sold by salespeople recast as workplace consultants.
- Smart furniture. Everyday life became digital and permanently connected. The assumption was that furniture should contain the technology of the moment. The result was tables, chairs and desks whose electronics became obsolete before their structures wore out.
- Biophilic design. Urban and screen-based life created a genuine hunger for nature. The assumption was that its visual signs could provide the same benefit. The result was greenery as decoration—planters, moss walls and leaf patterns applied to otherwise unchanged environments.
- Instagram modernism. Discovery moved into visual feeds. The assumption was that immediate recognition meant cultural relevance. The result was furniture optimised for the screen: quick to spread, quick to copy and quick to disappear.
- Furniture as a service. Keeping products and materials in circulation is a real need. The assumption is that leasing or a take-back programme can make an otherwise conventional business circular. The jury is still out: the model may work, but only if companies rebuild their economics around reverse logistics and refurbishment, accept operating at a smaller scale, and finance large upfront investments with long payback periods.
None of these begins foolishly. Each notices something real. They become false starts when the first legible answer hardens into a formula before the underlying change has been fully understood. The urge to solve problems and to build businesses around change is healthy. But if you confuse cultural relevance built from the roots up with the latest commercial fashion, you will have to pivot often.
Take it from someone who knows.
Petrus Palmér
Petrus Palmér is a designer and entrepreneur based in Stockholm. He co-founded the design studio Form Us With Love and the acoustic materials company BAUX. In 2014, he founded Hem and led it as CEO, building a culturally progressive furniture brand around collaborations with contemporary designers and the task of carrying new ideas from the studio into serial production and international distribution. Across these ventures, Palmér has worked on both sides of design: creating objects and building the organisations, relationships and commercial systems that allow them to enter the world. His writing grows out of that experience.
About A Small Future
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Sources and further reading
- Hem, “Reintroducing Experiment Chair.” https://hem.com/en-us/products/experiment
- Hem, “In the studio: Yrjö Kukkapuro.” https://hem.com/en-ca/articles/in-the-studio-yrjoe-kukkapuro
- Laura Houseley, editorial correspondence with Petrus Palmér, August 2026.
- Cassina, “iMaestri.” https://www.cassina.com/gb/en/maestri.html
- &Tradition, “About.” https://www.andtradition.com/about
- HAY, “Result Chair and Pyramid Collection.” https://www.hay.com/news/news-2017/result-chair-and-pyramid-collection
- Knoll, “Pollock Arm Chair.” https://www.knoll.com/design-plan/product/pollock-arm-chair
- GUBI, “Desks and storage.” https://gubi.com/en/fr/categories/desks-storage/storage
- Herman Miller, “Action Office Design Story.” https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/workspaces/workstations/action-office-system/design-story/
- Leon Ransmeier, “Live Action: Inventor Robert Propst and the History of the Modern Cubicle,” PIN–UP https://archive.pinupmagazine.org/articles/the-story-of-action-office-2-and-cubicle-inventor-robert-propst-herman-miller
- Museum of Modern Art, “Joe Colombo: Minikitchen, 1963.” https://www.moma.org/collection/works/89891
- Snowcrash, “Snowcrash 1997–2003.” https://snowcrashdesign.com/
- Ilkka Suppanen, correspondence with Petrus Palmér, August 2026.
- One Nordic Furniture Company, manifesto, 2014.
- Max Lamb, “Soft Poly Chair.” https://maxlamb.org/028-soft-poly-chair/
- Studio Sabine Marcelis, “Objects at Foam.” https://sabinemarcelis.com/projects/objects-at-foam
- Faye Toogood, “Roly Poly Chair.” https://www.fayetoogood.com/furniture/roly-poly-chair
- Humanscale, “Path.” https://www.humanscale.com/path/product.cfm
- TAKT, “Cross Chair.” https://taktcph.com/products/cross-chair/
- Fritz Hansen, “N02 Recycle.” https://www.fritzhansen.com/categories/products/popular-series/n02-recycle
- Driade, “Faye Toogood joins Driade with Roly Poly.” https://www.driade.com/en/story/2018-faye-toogood-joined-the-roster-of-driade-designers-with-roly-poly/
- MoMA, “Ron Arad: Big Easys.” https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/188/2501
- Moroso, “The Big Easy.” https://moroso.it/app/uploads/materiali/schede_tecniche/TheBigEasy_ENG.pdf
- Friedman Benda, “About.” https://www.friedmanbenda.com/about/
- Galerie kreo, “About.” https://www.galeriekreo.com/en/about/
- Salon 94 Design, “About.” https://salon94design.com/
- Etage Projects, “About.” https://etageprojects.com/about/
- Uppercut Space, “About us.” https://uppercut.space/about-us/
- Design Miami, “About us.” https://designmiami.com/about-us