This year’s edition of Ung Svensk Form offers the audience a thought-provoking and sensational journey into the borderland between utopia and dystopia. Perhaps this is the most conceptual round of Ung Svensk Form since the project started in Malmö in 1998. It is obvious that the need to comment on both present and future phenomena is strong whether it is furniture design, visual communication or speculative design.
But there are also projects that express solutions-oriented strategies such as the use of recycled materials and designs for public space that promote social sustainability and an active life in the city. And just like the last two years, the selected design objects commute between the analogue and the digital, often with great craftsmanship in the design. Yes – and sometimes with an unexpected form of presentation like when computer-generated renderings are replaced with time-consuming embroidery. Some of the projects questions the consumer society and encourage the design industry to rethink and re-do. The carefully crafted object with local production and local materials instead of mass-produced things that will travel across the earth to a local shop near you is perhaps the future – a future where quality rather than quantity is in focus. And we may see the beginning of a new role for the designer that is closer to the role of the free artist – a role to create artifacts that carry strong narratives and that comment on our contemporary society. Or that raises new thoughts and offers solutions for a society that needs to be transformed in a short time in a sustainable direction.
Mats Widbom, CEO Svensk Form
Photo: Rana Van Pellecom