THE PRINCIPLES

We live in a world full of consumption, planned obsolescence, and fast everything, Furniture waste is not something to gloss over, we are surrounded by it daily and I feel like we just accept it as part of our lives. But furniture waste is a real problem. 

The principles embody sustainable design. It’s quite simple; they focus on reducing furniture waste, by adding more worth to our furniture making it too cherished to throw out. The principles begin by exploring emotional durability with ideas of sentimentality and desire, we continue the study with ideas of reverse-consumerism and design resilience, and finally take a look into ecological sustainable ideals that you may not yet have considered. Invoking critical thinking results in our future furniture pieces becoming more desirable and therefore they are willingly kept in our lives and out of landfill. All in all these principles are here to assist in allowing you the reader to make your own design choices, and take what you need, and understand what designing for longevity embodies.


Personability:

Add value in individuality

We are talking about you, the individual, making conscious and considered decisions: The designer fulfils a brief without compromising on their indivisible aesthetic identity. The Craftsperson conjures objects into existence with their mastery of self developed hand skills. The patron chooses to purchase a significant piece of art, knowing the reverberations of their financial support, reinforcing the artist's vision. These are what personability is all about, the individual being the control and the identity behind each creative decision. You are the primary reason your work is sustainable.


As we interact with each of ‘The Principles’ we can choose how far we push each idea and have full control of our outcomes. They can be used with no real limitation; the amount put in should be reflected in the final result. This is why you as a designer need to market yourself as the reason people should choose you, because you’re a sustainable designer. When there is a direct connection between the artist and the customer there is an ongoing relationship, a personal connection and this can make your work invaluable (Dubin 2023). When you build a personal connection with your audience, they begin to form a stronger bond with you, this can be described as an emotional attachment, which will be embodied in your work. This happens all the time. We all have emotional attachments to inanimate objects because of who gave them to us, or who made them, and we love those objects more for it. (Dubin 2023; Norman 2003)


Design ingenuity:

Hand built legacy

At this stage of the creation process we are still thinking in the theoretical realm, but here is where ground breaking ideas and ‘Re-inventions of the wheel’ materialise. Conceptualising an idea into a narrative and then shaping that narrative into the physical world. This principle is about creating something that has meaning and gravity. We want to create things that draw people in; ‘emotionally durable design’ (Chapman 2009; Norman 2003) These are items that we want to keep, and that we adore because of how great the design ingenuity is.  This significance can be the reason something is deeply treasured, nurtured, and retained. This is sustainable design. 

How do we as designers and creators manufacture emotional durability? To start, we are going to assume that you already have a general idea of what you want to make. So how does it evolve into something momentous? The best approach is to start with some inspiration; there might be something you read, a new material you want to explore or you might have seen something interesting that another artist is doing. You can check our precedents page to see if some of the projects there might give that spark. Remember inspiration is not imitation. ‘Imitation is boring and lazy’ seeing the same thing over and over again means people will lose interest, (Hamdy 2024) they won't have an attachment and it will end up in the bin. Imitation goes in the bin Inspiration is usually necessary for ingeniousness, its coffee, its fuel for your creative brain. Find inspiration, challenge it and create something that inspires others.


Beyond this inspiration comes the substance - the emotional fondness that pulls people in and keeps them entrenched in the design. Every new bit of inspiration should be altered, moulded into your identity and therefore reinvented. Choosing to question your own aesthetic choices can really add significance to the identity of what you are producing. Start unpacking your own ideas: Why are you doing this in this particular way? or Why have you chosen this material?: The narrative starts building and the emotional attachment to the physical piece improves with it. This is where we tick boxes in terms of aesthetic choices and the visual significance of the piece itself. Does the piece have a uniqueness/individuality to it. Is there something to be discovered or features that take the user on a journey’ (Lacey 2009) Does the design age, and change over time or have an evolving aesthetic as part of its life?


Functionality:

Enduring Utilitarianism

The opposite of planned obsolescence (Slade 2006), this is a principle about planned continued use. How can we design things to survive and be enjoyed beyond the foreseeable future and into the unknown. It's not really about the reality of whether something will be used forever but more of the fundamental approach and optimistic view that it could be. Knowing the intended purpose of the object is essential in aiding its utilitarian nature, it's pretty obvious but still important.

Once you understand the intended purpose of an object, start to think of other uses that object might have. Let's use the example of a dining table: A dining table will be used as a place to eat food at, but also as a pedestal, a work surface, a playspace, and dumping ground, a sculpture, the anchor for dinner party, a meeting place, maybe even as a cubby house the list goes on. Having many unintended purposes isn't an inconvenience it’s a privilege, but all those uses should also be considered into the overall utility of the design. In essence the dining table needs to accommodate all of these functions to be serviceable for longer.


Conversely, a piece of furniture designed for a single purpose can become an inconvenience and end up unwanted, and rejected. (Slade 2006) People's needs and wants change over time, as does the function of the spaces our furniture occupies and we should attempt to plan for that. When we are discussing sustainable implications and reducing waste the usefulness of the piece of furniture can impact the desirability of the piece and thus increasing its lifespan.


Resilience:

Built to not be binned

Previously we have talked about emotional durability and designing for the future. Here we are talking about a straightforward application, designing the actual physical durability of an object. We are talking about literally building things to last! I feel like this is already a big focus of many good quality furniture builds and we know it's crucial, but it is so important to make sure that the previous principles are not overlooked. (Gnanapragasam, Cole, Singh & Cooper 2018) If something is built to last physically but unlikely to last emotionally we start to get less ideal outcomes in terms of sustainable design and in some cases this can be more detrimental than beneficial .


Understanding the intended purpose of furniture, from the last principle makes choosing the right materials much simpler, if a furniture piece is going to be interacted with continually, the build quality and the choice of materials and surface treatment should be reflected.


There are some layers of design resilience that are not as often considered but are of great importance, especially when we are talking about furniture endurance. The resilience of the furniture should consider ongoing maintenance through Restorability and Repairability and even potential Upgradability. -more on upgradability in the next principle- Durability goes hand in hand with resilience and restoration and the choice of materials and surface finishes should allow for this. If you are not going to be involved in ongoing maintenance, you should consider educating a customer on how to care, maintain and restore.


Longlife Furniture:

Reassemble the future

Design for reassembly leads into repair, an essential part of longlife furniture, but also factors into other practical outcomes.  Flatpack furniture is a prime example of assembly and ideally re-assembly, to save space and cost in shipping. The real benefit here is if parts can be attached, they can be removed and replaced, potentially upgraded, but essentially repaired. Sometimes structural integrity is compromised by these assembly ideas, think about some of the commercially available flatpack furniture you might have put on the side of the road, often these items aren’t made for the long haul. When the implementation of ‘re-assembly is designed for the longevity of a product (through repair), it also opens up many possibilities if done right.

If we think bigger picture, for instance; the big: Re-assembly becomes so obvious. Sometimes things won't fit in a lift, or through a doorway, or they are just too heavy or massive to move anywhere. Designing for reassembly can lend itself to removing some of the restrictions the real world throws at us, and this goes back to longevity of design. At the end of the day if your project has that utility, to pack down, it hopefully will remain in the world for longer. If someone wants to move house it could move with them and if something gets damaged it can be fixed.

Sometime the material doesn't lend itself to being seamlessly restored, or total parts need to be replaced, and they don't quite match the rest of the item. In another sense, these are opportunities for an item to show a story about it being interacted with, damaged and repaired. (Keulemans, Jansen & Cahill 2023) From a sustainable design point of view, if a piece of furniture still upholds its primary function without compromise its not waste. And you can market these aesthetic changes as upgrades.



Localisation:

Distance not travelled

Localisation is a fundamental of sustainable design, its not just a topic about reducing the distance travelled of the physical, but about nurturing the local economy and the local culture. Localisation is designing for the people not the profit, it's a big middle finger to global corporation where the economic side effects of your creating goes to the people that you choose. ‘Today, designers have a choice: they can either contribute to the global system that values exploitation, consumption and waste or join in a shift toward the local, where it is life itself that is of the highest value.’ (Norberg-Hodge 2018)


Choose locally made or produced materials, learn about where they come from and whether that sits well with your own ideals. Connect with your cities manufacturers and nearby industry. Sometimes the process might be surprisingly streamlined. If the cost of production increases, decide whether that is really a bad thing and adjust your prices accordingly. Investing in the local economy, builds the local economy and changes the local perspective, encouraging the local economy to invest in you.


End of life:

No more resin ‘river tables’

The bulk of the furniture waste problem is an accumulation of poorly made products falling apart and ‘fast furniture’ no-longer being desired all ending up in landfill. Most of the time it's because these products are not able to be repaired or recycled, and we have no desire for them or to keep them around in our lives anyway. This is what the past Principles have been attempting to remedy. 


What can we do if your products get to the stage where they are at the ‘end of their life’. You need to make sure you can separate the organic components from the non-organic components, as you put something together, think about how you can take it apart. Designing for disassemble helps with this, but really you want to be able to separate the different materials , reducing the amount for disposal and reusing and recycling the rest. This is about extended producer responsibility. What do you think happens to a nice piece of organic, biodegradable wood when it is filled with resin?

What this guide has aimed to do is give you some ideas about less searchable sustainable design principles. Most of the sustainable furniture guides you will find out there talk about ‘Greener furniture’, but I am not here to talk about that. Choosing appropriate materials, finishes and environmentally less-impacting products are givens; a quick google search can give you lots of information.



Impact:

A Reminder of Self reflection

It is good to finish off a project with a quick evaluation of the final result. Stop and reflect on what went right and what went wrong, take a few notes, take some photos and add a date. The word sustainability, outside of an ecological sense is about maintaining and continuing and at this final principle we encourage you to keep on keeping on. Look at the smaller picture and see how that impacts the bigger picture. You can make all the difference, one sustainable furniture project at a time. (Miscellany News 2013, Taylor 1997)


The final impart of knowledge and wisdom: 

According to Kubota What is the second most impactful thing you can do to help the environment? Turn Waste into Art! (Kubota 2024)  Afterall, sustainable design is here to combat the waste problem. Now go out there and eat the rich (Soeffky 2024)

FAQs

  • This website is for EVERYONE. When I say everyone, I am referring to ‘CREATIVES’; People who are interested in exploring sustainably minded design principles for their own designs. ‘CREATORS’; Those makers who may want to embody these principles in their own projects and productions. Finally it is for ‘CREATIVE ENTHUSIASTS’; the ones who would like to have things made by creatives and creators and feel like they would like some more understanding in their decision making.

  • No, don't put too much pressure on yourself, every little bit adds up. The principles are here as an invitation. If you find a single thing useful and that's enough for you, that's still a step forward for sustainability.

  • It all begins with some inspiration. If you have an idea of something you want to design or make, start to think critically about how it might be loved, or interacted with in years to come. If you can imagine it still being cherished  in the distant future, you’re on the right track.

  • That is Awesome! Be proud of your creation and show it off. Let others know that you’re kicking sustainable design goals and realise that you are making a positive difference to the world furniture waste problem.

    Please get in contact, through Instagram or Email and we can talk further about this. (precedents form coming soon)

  • Thanks for your positive feedback, it means the world. If you want to get in contact with me about some future furniture projects please email me