Hasta La Ideas

Not minimum viable product, but minimum viable material usage. Here’s a dozen designers we saw in 2022 trying to do more with less. (Kicking it off, you’ll see trestles are a thing.)

Ludwig Kaimer’s Trestle Hito: Five oak dowels, two cast iron connectors

Lennart Ebert’s T3 Trestle: A T-profile top and identical angled cuts made in the legs

Gerdesmeyer Krohn’s Hung Trestle: Folding legs

Takeshi Nishio’s T_Lex pop-up furniture

Pascal Hien’s Migo Chair: A waste-minimizing design cut from a single board

Martha Schwindling’s Bevel Series: Angles wring sturdy seating out of thin plywood

Jonas Finkeldei’s Flis: Expandable flatpack tables with sliding key joinery

S Mate Oleh’s OO Stool, designed to minimize off-cuts

Rainer Mutsch’s Alva, a sturdy shelf design that uses a minimum of material for the vertical supports

Franck Magné’s Zero Chair, designed for minimal production waste

Shinya Oguchi’s Arch Bench, made of 3.2mm-thick steel sheets

Sander Nevejans’ Sane Desk folds down to just 4cm thick

We hope to see, er, less from these folks in 2023!