For homeware designers Torbjørn Anderssen and Espen Voll, obsolescence is a thing of the past. Their Nedre Foss range is created to last a lifetime with ‘century products’ that will be around for 100 years or more. As the pair explain, it may not be commercially fashionable, but it’s the natural outcome of responsible design and taking sustainability seriously
Back in 2015, Torbjørn Anderssen and Espen Voll launched Nedre Foss, a brand of sustainable homeware objects rooted in Scandinavian design. The core of Nedre Foss is the notion of the ‘century product’, an object built to last 100 years and remain relevant for just as long. The studio’s co-founders tell OnOffice what it takes to create such a product – and speculate what the future of sustainable design might look like.
OnOffice: Please talk us through the philosophy behind the concept of a ‘century product’?
Nedre Foss: An object will always mirror its own time in some way, that’s partly why we continue to make things. But how can any object stay relevant for a century? What we have done is to try to approach this task by choosing categories that we have collectively kept in our interiors for centuries. If we have already kept them for centuries, we might want to keep them for another 100 years. We also believe that true sculptural quality surpasses shifting trends.
OO: What made you want to design homewares in this way?
NF: It came down to accepting full responsibility for an object, for the main idea and the design phase, the sourcing, the production, and then the packaging and shipping. It is a great feeling to send off a beautiful piece with the certainty that it could last for 100 years. If you say a product will last that long, you say so much about how that product is made, and all the layers of meaning around it.
OO: Do you think that sustainability starts with the designers, rather than the manufacturer?
NF: Until about 10 years ago, we felt a little set apart from production and manufacturing. We would do something more like an idea exercise, and then would hand it over partially unsolved to the manufacturers. However, 70 per cent of any object’s environmental footprint is solved at a design level and not at a manufacturing level. Nedre Foss has helped us to move our projects out of our studio bubble and towards creating objects that endure; we now think about what features might bring real, everyday value – and what might be considered design fiction. We choose natural materials that are either renewable or recyclable. Materials that age with grace: oil wax on solid wood; scrap iron cast into sculpture and seasoned with vegetable oil. Solidity and mass are important traits of Nedre Foss.
OO: What role can technology play in making a business such as yours more sustainable?
NF: We would never have started Nedre Foss if we didn’t have the possibility of 3D printing and 3D scanning, which allows us to understand the objects fully and to live with them for a time. Before this technology, it would have been difficult for us to refine the products in the way that we have. So the possibility of 3D printing really speeds up our process, helps with the quality and also gives us the confidence to invest in the tooling.
OO: What do you feel the design industry should do more of to embrace sustainability in future?
NF: The industry can definitely take more responsibility. And instead of just making something certified, you could go beyond that and look at how to make an object exceptional. It takes a lot of courage, because the answers you might get may not look like a commercially viable object. So, it takes time for people to digest and understand that something might look different because it performs differently. And it takes courage to make these new proposals. We are at a very interesting intersection in time right now where this is actually happening. It’s important, both for us and for the industry, to challenge people’s preconceptions of what an established product category might look like. We need to find a new kind of design language.
Images by Inger Marie Grini
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