Super.Flax

SuperFlax was commissioned for the 2024 Australian Furniture Design Award (AFDA) by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and Stylecraft. This significant design accolade, recognises excellence in Australian furniture design and its contribution to design discourse and culture. Specifically, the award prioritises experimentation into new furniture forms and aesthetics; challenges designers to consider the convergence of traditional and emerging technologies; demonstrate techniques that challenge existing production systems and supply chains; speculate on how furniture might evolve in connection to social, cultural, environmental and technological forces. Via prototyping, our research demonstrates an innovative response to each of these themes.

Using design prototyping as a primary research method, SuperFlax demonstrates the aesthetic and functional possibilities of contemporary bio-composite techniques in concert with renewable material streams and historical making practices. The use of bio-composite textiles --flax yarn and biomass resins— for both surface articulation and structural purposes is surprisingly unprecedented in contemporary furniture manufacturing which instead favours petrochemical materials and energy intensive forming processes such as injection moulding. In contrast, knitting offers a materially efficient and highly scalable strategy with expressive qualities that are easily formed using the material’s own tensile behaviour. An innovative method that supports efficient and repeatable manufacturing.

Fast objects, like fast fashion, present an immense challenge to a decarbonised object future. Our research champions ethical, sustainable and healthy (i.e. non-toxic) material streams while demonstrating the viability of efficient localised manufacturing. By employing a design-based research methodology, we disseminate our research findings through the example of a unique, beautiful and culturally valuable object that tangibly highlights the transformative possibilities of sustainable design practices. Our work challenges the status quo and industry’s heavy reliance on petrochemical materials and processes. We suggest our method is scalable and could easily be translated and adopted by industry.

Our research reveals the entanglement of material experimentation, fabrication innovation and object design provides rich pathways for embedding design within ethical, healthy and purposeful cultural and environmental contexts. In spanning the entire design-to-production chain, our work places equivalent intellectual value on the design of our tools (i.e. knitting machine) as it does on the form of the resulting object and as such creatively navigates the dictum that design tools not only afford design possibility but without vigilance can equally suppress it. We suggest tools and their resulting outputs exist within a critical and enabling ecology of feedback, each informing the other and as such the authorship of both should be regarded as central and valuable domains of contemporary design research and practice.