by Julia Postrzech
& Emma Sjöholm
27 / 10 / 2026
Positivity, image by Emma Sjöholm
From doubts about the current design sphere, we came together with our similar notions for making, and combined our work so that it would bring new and disparate viewpoints. We navigated questions about how we actually connect to design and objects, and how that can form a connection with our inside, our psychology and even our souls. What speaks to us, to our inner child, our imagination and our wellbeing?
We really felt that we didn’t want to take the obvious inspirations. The ones that are already physical, tactile and immediately visible to the eye. We wanted to think deeper, examine us, the human, and through it ask questions about ourselves, the types of behaviours and emotions, as well as those that are easily fleeting. Only then, we felt we were able to bring the ideas into actual objects and begin the making process. We didn’t want to see a leaf, recreate it and call it: inspired by nature.
Interested in humanistic design and how we shape emotional attachment to objects and architecture, Emma has focused her reading and analysis in materiality, sometimes converting concrete, timber or even linoleum into characters with personalities and emotions. Following this, she aimed to convert her research into handcrafting furniture. Using clay and dedicating five minutes only to each, she made small sketch models, allowing the shapes, forms and textures to take over. When finished, she identified a selection that carried hidden messages of support, familial characteristics and friendship.
Positivity, image by Emma Sjöholm
This gave her the idea of creating a new joinery system evoking a similar notion of familial relations. The repeated system of parts hugging and leaning against one another in this arrangement, would stay together, using nothing but their natural forces. Finally the developed structure became a simple coffee table titled Positivity after its plus shaped pieces. With the weight of a glass top leaving visibility to the system, it stays together and centres as a gathering point for those who use it.
Emma’s design makes a mark in speaking of support networks through materiality and form. Every single piece is essential for each piece to stay upright and in its position, making it furthermore a fully complete design. Once you start editing, and taking some parts away, it can no longer work.
Julia took on the familiar practice of humans as subject matter. She combined it with the deeply ingrained human behaviour of attaching humanlike qualities onto non-human entities, known in cognitive psychology as anthropomorphism. Within her research she found that furniture design only exhibits the human in physical terms, with limbs recreated as tables, feminine curves as more desirable armchairs, or eyes seen as lightbulbs. Nonetheless, this psychological process is about our imagination and our natural way of understanding and interpreting things that are non-human. It is about making sense of what we don’t know, and by attaching something human, the highest organisation we know, we can instinctively understand and communicate with it.
Nostalgia, image by Julia Postrzech
The design centers itself around this cognitive process and our natural skill for imagination. From this, Julia has set out to create a lighting collection that would show and be interpreted as human emotions. To make it easily understandable, she searched for ways that people express emotions non-verbally and ways that those could be recreated in a still object. This has led her to capturing human relationships, interactions and the types of communications we exhibit only through our body language. Communication is one of the ways that helps us evolve and body cues make us understand each other quicker, therefore seeing human internal states within the objects would come to us very naturally.
The final lighting collection, titled This Lamp Has Feelings, with subtle references to the human body, uses our imagination and initiates our very innate behaviour of anthropomorphism. Each of the three lamps represent a couple that is nonverbally communicating with one another, and through their specific body language, they reveal a human emotion.
Affection, image by Julia Postrzech
Combining both efforts of using research in psychology and systems of connection as design processes, in order to bring us closer to our human internal states, a new typology and project started to take shape as part of Habitare’s design competition 2025. The project had to answer to a brief of creating a so-called Domestic Island of Relaxation and following previous research, it was a natural step to interpret this as relaxation of the mind. The concept behind this competition entry was to translate a grounding technique used for anxiety attacks into a physical object. The result became a floating mobile sculpture, embodying five visual objects with four tactile, three auditive, and two olfactory qualities, and finally one gustatory element. All based on the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 grounding technique.
Named Rest in (5) Pieces, the project creates a sense of floating islands, unobstructive and quiet, yet always available to take the user away from their immediate physical environment and towards their own, more valuable inner island of mental rest. A mobile is often seen as a distant and delicate construction. In this interpretation with its five floating islands, it invites the user to interact and play with the more tactile variations of wood, minerals, textile and metals. The mobile centres the mind below with its objects and colours, evoking sounds, sensations, and tastes with the user’s vision and touch.
Rest in ( 5 ) Pieces
Following these projects, ideas and the processes behind them, we want to highlight the importance of creating more meaningful designs that do not simply replicate what is already there. We want to bring forward a design language that attempts to describe what it means to be human and how this humanness can be cherished, encouraged and connected with through a creative design process. In a time of economical, political, as well as personal uncertainty and heightened loneliness, is it important that as creatives, we can bring back the simplicity of being human into our objects and spaces, that in return can help ground or connect with ourselves.
Rest in ( 5 ) Pieces