Beata Salonen Ripa

Globalisation has given us fantastic opportunities while also contributing to the systems that most affect the climate. One of the growing environmental problems is the furniture industry, and according to the Nature Conservation Association, furniture consumption in Sweden has increased by 50% in the last ten years. I therefore decided to design a sofa to highlight this problem.

As a counterpoint to globalisation, I wanted to see how locally a sofa can be produced and investigate how outsourcing affects Swedish production. Inspired by Scania (the southernmost region in Sweden) and the small village I grew up in, with its local initiatives and small businesses, this project was shaped around three themes: locality, the consumer’s relationship to the product, and “design for disassembly”.

The result is a disassemblable sofa made of Scanian wool, pine from the local lumberman and linen from the last active weaving mill in Scania. In my degree project, I elaborate on the tension between profit-making, sustainability and consumerism and try to find answers to what production could look like in the future.