Elementary themes
How can interior design change anything?
Why bother making new stuff when the world is already full of it? We are at a point where we need to rethink from scratch the way we make the objects and spaces of our life.
At Elementa we are working with a framework of 8 big themes that we believe will change how we experience our spaces in the years to come. More than anytying they are a growing collection of urgent questions!
Our mision is to attempt to suggest concrete and actionable answers to these riddles by means of products, ideas, conversations and services.
Silence & Sound
Along with many of nature’s living species, silence itself is endangered. Is silence the absence of sound, the presence of specific sounds or just a state of mind?
What can design and architecture do to provide time and space for the experience of silence? How can we combat noise polution in concrete ways? On the other hand, how can we use sound actively as a “building material” of spatial experiences?
Circular Normality
The modernist approach to design has been enormously successful in many ways, but has failed to take into account the prelife and the afterlife of its products and spaces.
How can we make everyday products for work and play that take into account the dignity of both nature, matter and labour itself? If we had the freedom to - or even just had to - reinvent the stuff we surround ourselves with from scratch - how would would it look?
Virtual Spaces
Computers are helping us make objects and spaces that were once unthinkable, yet most of them bound to our 2-dimensional rectangular screens - and structured by manipulative algorithms.
How can we use new digital strategies such as VR, AR and AI to enrich and enlarge our spaces rather than to colonize them?
Autonomy & locality
Despite the huge advances in design and technology the last 100 years, most people’s lives are more complex than ever.
Can we make our own stuff, and electricty - and grow our own food? Can we make a family house for less than 100 000 Euro? Are there unexplored posibilities of mobile architecture - on land and at sea?
Shared intentionality
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are impacting society in deep ways - and not only in the financial realm. The same technologhy is about to make possible new ways of collaborating on worthy causes and shortcutting ingrained hierarchies.
What are the posibilities of cryptography and blockchain technology for how we make objects and spaces?
Biophilia & biodiversity
In the middle of “the 5th mass extinction” of living species on earth, its easy to despair. Yet that is exactly what we cannot afford to do. We are as much nature as any other creature - and now we have to act decisively with some dignity.
How can we open our environments, buildings and spaces for the other beings from the other realms of nature? Can we use design to imagine a spaces and objects that transcend the habitual dichotomy between nature and culture?
Patterns everywhere!
Patterns are everywhere! Recognicing and appreciating them is at the heart of both our own intelligence and artificial intelligence. Modern science can make visible hitherto undetectable patterns revealing the invisible music of life and being as it were.
How can we bring the beauty of new patterns into our everyday spaces and objects? What is the potential for patterns to transform our everyday experience of space?
Inner Space Exploration
Accessing the Inner Spaces of our souls has been cultivated as a serious craft in most human cultures before modernity. This has taken many forms, such as meditation, sense deprivation, the use of psychoactive plants and other shamanic techniques.
How can exploring inner spaces inform the making of our outer spaces? How can our built environments help us appreciate the infinitely strange mystery of being in space and time right here and now?