Riekje Marie Paruschke
Industrial Design master
Royal Academy Of Art The Hague KABK
Specialisms: Furniture / Sustainable Design / Material Innovation
Location: Den Haag, Netherlands
Riekje Marie Paruschke
First Name: Riekje Marie
Last Name: Paruschke
Specialisms: Furniture / Sustainable Design / Material Innovation
Sectors:
My Location: Den Haag, Netherlands
University / College: Royal Academy Of Art The Hague KABK
Course / Program Title: Industrial Design master
About
Riekje Marie Paruschke is an industrial designer and researcher whose practice investigates material cultures, ecological interdependencies, and post-industrial forms of production. Combining research, material experimentation, and critical design approaches, she explores how design can contribute to more sustainable and multispecies futures.
Rerooting Forward: Designing for Death Beyond Fast Furniture
Furniture today often appears detached from the landscapes and bodies that bring it into being. A flat packed IKEA LACK table arrives as a discrete object in a box, its lively origins compressed into smooth, standardised surfaces. Behind this apparent simplicity lie monoculture forests, intensive extraction, global transportation networks and synthetic binders that affect both human and non human ‘critters’. Rerooting Forward examines the IKEA LACK table as a lens through which to trace these material and industrial relations. In collaboration with municipal maintenance services and landscape companies in The Hague, locally sourced leaves, branches and wood chips are cultivated with fungal mycelium, whose growth interweaves these materials into new furniture bodies. The installation situates the tables within a forest like environment, disrupting their recognition as autonomous commodities and foregrounding their material and ecological entanglements. Through storytelling, the furniture is followed across processes of growth, human use and decay. Design becomes an ongoing negotiation with ecological processes, challenging the separation of nature, culture and technology and positioning furniture within shared material ecologies rather than outside them. The project imagines how furniture production might become more local, regenerative and responsive to the ecological conditions of its place.
Competitions
