Profile: Smriti Bharti – Only Natural Design Competitions

Smriti Bharti

Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Smriti Bharti is an interior architect and textile designer whose practice explores how the material and making choices behind the spaces and objects we inhabit shape our relationships with them. Based in Oslo, Norway, she holds a Master's degree in Interior Architecture and Furniture Design from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and a Master's degree in Textile Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. Positioned at the intersection of textiles and architecture, Smriti's practice is driven by material inquiry and hands-on exploration. Her work draws upon textile logics such as layering, interlacing, tension, softness, rhythm, and repetition, translating them into spatial and architectural contexts. Through this interdisciplinary approach, she investigates the relationships between structure and surface, body and space, and the tactile and sensory qualities of the built environment. Her creative process is rooted in direct engagement with materials and making practices, encompassing weaving, felting, printing, dyeing, woodworking, and experimental material manipulation. She is particularly interested in how processes of transformation and care can reveal new values and meanings within reclaimed, overlooked, and naturally occurring materials and everyday matter. Alongside her design practice, Smriti's interest in foraging informs her approach to material exploration and place-based making. Observing, collecting, and working with materials found within local landscapes allows her to develop a deeper understanding of ecological relationships, seasonal cycles, and regional material cultures. This sensitivity to context is reflected in her work's emphasis on locality, craftsmanship, and attention to detail. Through objects, materials, and spatial interventions, Smriti seeks to create experiences that invite reflection on our connections to materials, making processes, maker and the environment we inhabit.

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Surface Matters

Category: Interior

Competitions: Home Competition 2026

Do surfaces matter in shaping how we experience and connect with spaces and objects we use? Surface Matters emerges from this question in a time of pre-packaged food, digital touch screens and anonymous neutrality of mass produced goods, where spaces we inhabit, too, are marked by growing uniformity, diminishing sense of tactility and dominance of synthetic materials. The project considers surfaces as more than just visual finishes, presenting them as relational interfaces where materials, making, maker, landscape and user intersect, expanding on how spaces are conceived and experienced. With an interdisciplinary approach between textiles and interior architecture, the project focuses on two natural materials: soft rush (Juncus effusus) and Norwegian wool (Norsk Kvit Sau and Spælsau). These materials share a layered relationship in the Norwegian landscape, where soft rush is recognised as a weed that spreads across grazing pastures for sheep. Bringing them together shifts this tension into a material dialogue, through a process driven by making as a form of enquiry. The two materials are explored through hand weaving and felting as surface construction techniques, allowing material behaviour to guide the outcome, revealing how surfaces emerge through elements such as resistance, friction, heat, moisture and interlacements. Through the use of these local, abundant and overlooked natural materials, the project invites the appreciation of the qualities of irregularity, organicity and the presence of the handmade in our surrounding spaces. The explorations culminate in an interactive installation consisting of ten objects that functions as an enquiry into how surfaces mediate perception, touch, and spatial awareness. Rather than presenting a fixed solution, the installation proposes a space of attention and encounter, through its surface qualities and form that aim to engage humans through the sense of touch along with the sense of sight with guided movement around the objects. The installation invites visitors to wonder about the materials, the making, the maker, and to saunter in the details, the textures and the imaginative form of the objects constituting the space.