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Johanna Gilan

Kontsfack University of Art, Craft and Design

I am a Swedish designer and recent master’s graduate in industrial design with a strong focus on sustainability, material innovation, and circular design. My work explores how furniture and interior objects can be created from natural, low-impact, and biodegradable materials without losing emotional value, comfort, or aesthetic quality. I am especially interested in plant-based and compostable materials such as hemp, mycelium, wool, and other renewable resources. Through my design practice, I investigate how traditional craft, contemporary production methods, and ecological responsibility can meet in objects made for everyday life. My aim is to create thoughtful, beautiful, and responsible designs that challenge the way we produce, use, and discard furniture. By working only with natural materials, I want to contribute to a future where design feels both inspiring and deeply connected to the living world.

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Memento Mori

Category: Furniture

Competitions: Home Competition 2026

Memento Mori is a modular sofa made from hemp and mushroom mycelium, designed as an alternative to the fossil-based and chemically complex systems that dominate upholstered furniture today. The project places natural materials at the centre of both construction and expression, but also questions what “natural” means when materials are taken from different ecological and industrial cycles. Even sofas marketed as natural often contain a complex mix of materials: wood, metals, animal-based fillings such as wool or feathers from resource-intensive livestock systems, or latex sourced from tropical regions. At the end of life, these combinations are still difficult to separate, repair, recycle or compost, meaning that even furniture made partly from natural materials may ultimately be incinerated or sent to landfill. Memento Mori proposes a more coherent biological material strategy. The sofa uses mushroom mycelium as a structural binder, grown together with hemp substrate to create lightweight solid modules. Hemp is also used for padding and textile components, chosen for its strong fibres, low resource requirements and potential to be cultivated in Nordic conditions. Together, these materials replace polyurethane foam, synthetic textiles, adhesives and mixed-material assemblies with a narrower palette of renewable, biodegradable materials. The modular construction allows the sofa to be adapted, repaired and reconfigured over time, extending its functional lifespan. At the end of use, the biological material strategy opens up the possibility for the sofa to return safely to the soil rather than remain as waste. The title Memento Mori refers to impermanence: a reminder that all objects have an origin, a lifespan and an ending. Rather than hiding this reality, the project uses it as a design principle. Through soft volumes, tactile natural surfaces and a contemporary modular form, Memento Mori aims to show that sustainable furniture can be beautiful, comfortable, durable and commercially relevant without relying on synthetic materials or fragmented material systems. Rather than resisting decay, the sofa is designed to acknowledge it. After a long life, its materials are intended to return to the soil, leaving behind only the memory of having existed.

In association with Arts Thread

Working with our partners at Arts Thread to develop lifelong learning and career opportunities for students of fashion and design. Our partnership provides the opportunity to compete on a world stage, participate in industry led workshops, set up an outstanding portfolio and gain access to the resources that will kickstart careers in fashion and design.