🗝️ We never named them until it was sure they would survive, 2025
MA Graduation work, Design Academy Eindhoven
„We never named them until it was sure they would survive”, explores a post-mass-production world through the lens of prepper culture and survivalist thought.
Set in a speculative future scenario shaped by environmental collapse directly linked to the rate and the way “stuff” is produced, the work critically examines humanity’s historical addiction to consumption, the complacency enabled by capitalist structure. The project imagines a global shutdown of mass production in 2068, marking a societal turning point where manufactured abundance is replaced by scarcity.
Preparing for that world, survivalists, aiming to supplement essences of a capitalist system and ensuring the survival of the concept of consumption, need to rethink the way products are made, following the dogma “form follows fluid function”; by deliberately ignoring the initial function and meaning of objects, they can be unlocked as raw material and shape without preconfigure connotations, transforming them into modules. When the parts that make an object are objects themselves, a function larger than the sum of its parts can emerge and disappear as needed. These monochromatic chimeric assemblages are held together by roping techniques (a modified jam-knot), enabling disassembly and the modules to return to their initial function or to be reused and interchanged between sets.
The installation mimics a “bunker-showroom”, a store-like presentation of a curation of interior items made using this technique as well as the items collected to do so, while collectively reflecting on past, present and future human needs.
Shown at
Graduation Show Design Academy Eindhoven, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, 2025
Near, far, wherever you are, Vienna Design Week, by bureau fomo, Vienna, 2025
OPEN STUDIO, Tag der offenen Tür 3, Vienna, 2025
Photo credits - Ronald Smits, Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland
MA Graduation work, Design Academy Eindhoven
„We never named them until it was sure they would survive”, explores a post-mass-production world through the lens of prepper culture and survivalist thought.
Set in a speculative future scenario shaped by environmental collapse directly linked to the rate and the way “stuff” is produced, the work critically examines humanity’s historical addiction to consumption, the complacency enabled by capitalist structure. The project imagines a global shutdown of mass production in 2068, marking a societal turning point where manufactured abundance is replaced by scarcity.
Preparing for that world, survivalists, aiming to supplement essences of a capitalist system and ensuring the survival of the concept of consumption, need to rethink the way products are made, following the dogma “form follows fluid function”; by deliberately ignoring the initial function and meaning of objects, they can be unlocked as raw material and shape without preconfigure connotations, transforming them into modules. When the parts that make an object are objects themselves, a function larger than the sum of its parts can emerge and disappear as needed. These monochromatic chimeric assemblages are held together by roping techniques (a modified jam-knot), enabling disassembly and the modules to return to their initial function or to be reused and interchanged between sets.
The installation mimics a “bunker-showroom”, a store-like presentation of a curation of interior items made using this technique as well as the items collected to do so, while collectively reflecting on past, present and future human needs.
Shown at
Graduation Show Design Academy Eindhoven, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, 2025
Near, far, wherever you are, Vienna Design Week, by bureau fomo, Vienna, 2025
OPEN STUDIO, Tag der offenen Tür 3, Vienna, 2025
Photo credits - Ronald Smits, Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland