What’s New for Interior Design From Europe’s WORTH Project?

Would you like to know what’s in the interior design pipeline for the next couple of years? So would we! That’s why we were interested to hear about the WORTH Partnership Project, which brings designers, manufacturers and tech providers together to help develop design ideas and make them a reality.

The project focuses on lifestyle industries, including textile and clothing, footwear, leather and fur, furniture, and home decoration, jewellery and accessories. Designers chosen by the project receive development support, financial support, coaching on business strategy and technology development, legal advice, the chance to participant in exhibitions and help with networking and making contacts. WORTH is now in its fourth year of implementation and has supported many small and medium businesses across Europe. Here are some of the projects currently under development.

Lumimóza, a handcrafted, unique porcelain lamp by Hungarian designer Edina Andrási

Edina is seeking to reinvent the porcelain sector with contemporary products, and has come up with the Lumimóza lamp made of thin, overlapping circles of porcelain. She has received help from the WORTH project to develop a new translucent layered porcelain material, for use in lighting and has also been partnered with a company in the Ukraine who grow and process industrial hemp. The Ukraine company can provide sustainable packaging materials for transporting the lamps after production.

This new sustainable material is made from waste, and particularly the waste that ends up in the world’s oceans. Moseanic combines porcelain, cellulose fibre and ocean plastic to create a new base material that’s strong, solid, translucent and natural. You can see the ocean plastic through it, serving as a reminder of its origins. The design team are currently exploring lots of options for its use in conjunction with Slovenian designer Lucka Berlot, who works in the field of art lighting, lighting design and film.

MOWO plywood seat by Austrian-born designer Lisa Stolz

The WORTH project has brought together designers and other creatives from 35 countries, including the UK. One that looks set to be interesting is the MOWO, a soft and elastic seat made out of wood. After testing different techniques European birch plywood was chosen for its high bending strength and the resulting stool-like seat allows tilting and twisting movements, adapting to the body’s weight and shape and helping to support the user’s natural balance. It’s the brainchild of furniture designer Lisa Stolz, who’s based in London. She has Master’s degrees in both furniture design and architecture and has used her experience to create this ergonomic seat which allows the user to move. She’s been partnered with Tamas Babits, owner of Licit LTD, a plywood manufacturing company in Hungary. His own label ‘Plydesign’ is a new Hungarian furniture label. The brand is committed to re-establishing Hungarian furniture design by advocating young talents and high-quality manufacturing.

Margarete cork task chair by German designer Paolo de Jesus

The idea here was to design and develop a versatile task chair to be used in a home office or other working environment, that would address both aesthetic, ergonomic and economic requirements of this particular market. The finished product also needed to be lightweight and easily portable, as well as made from sustainable materials and able to be dismantled at the end of its life for easy recycling. Designed by Berlin based product/furniture designer Paolo de Jesus, the finished prototype Margarete chair is made of an iron frame with a cork seat and back rest. Project parners including Clever3D+ Studio in Portugal, who are the cork experts, and Ironworks UK who manufacture high quality bespoke metalwork products using traditional forging, fabrication and welding methods. To further enhance the manufacturing process and optimize efficiency, a potential integration of robots can be explored, you can get the best industrial robots Australia has to offer at Diverseco.

For a full list of all the projects currently in the pipeline, visit the WORTH Project website to see what may be heading our way over the next year or two.

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