Hella Jongerius has an earnest and poetic way of talking about her work, which one might describe as practice-led design research, rather than simply industrial design, the label usually assigned to it. For on many levels Jongerius’ practice is at odds with the design industry, usually characterised by speed and short-term relationships. What is striking about her approach are the intensely close connections she has built with specific clients such as Maharam, Vitra and Nymphenburg, and, similarly, the deep and long-standing collaboration she has enjoyed with Galerie kreo for over 25 years. What unites the designer to each of them is the sharing of common values. Her studio Jongeriuslab, created in 1993, has likewise remained human in scale and cultivates long-standing collaborations with designers. Time thus holds a certain centrality not only to Jongerius’ ethos, but also, and critically, to her material, colour and texture research.

Continuous experimentation is a related trait of the designer’s approach. Jongerius keeps on learning new skills and training; she is currently studying glazes for ceramics, a recurrent medium in her work, but one that she has recently started to work with more directly. She also regularly self-initiates projects that test new processes, combinations of materials and gestures, some of which lead to industrial spin-offs and others to remarkable, reflective presentations. Such projects have notably engaged with colour behaviour (culminating in the exhibition Breathing Colour, 2017 Design Museum, London) and analogue 3-D weaving (Interlace, textile research, 2019, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris).

With experimentation comes fruition, non-fruition, contingency, accidents, imperfections: a whole work of unlearning what constitutes markers of success and failure, and of re-learning how to engage with and tune into materials, their aliveness and what they are telling us. For attention, but also self-education and communication, are required when one’s plea is planetary health or, as Jongerius puts it, to be a ‘designer on a mission’. She wants to alter the restless habits of producers and consumers, and reform design altogether, one of the most environmentally damaging industry, as she likes to remind us. In her view, design has a major responsibility in ensuring sound relationships between people and the objects they surround themselves with daily. Design mediates between humans and the world; that mediation ought to be virtuous rather than merely based on market demands and the illusion of novelty.