From Sweden with Love

For Swedish studio f orm u s W I th L ove , design is not just about creating beautiful things.

Founders of Form Us With Love, Jonas Pettersson and John Löfgren, join us via Zoom from Sweden, each in their respective sommarstuga, or summerhouse – places that hold a special place in Swedish culture. Most Swedes spend the summer months detoxing in these simple and beautiful houses, typical perhaps of the egalitarian nature of the Scandinavian country, where a holiday home is not a preserve of the wealthy. It’s hard not to wonder if their background in this type of society has impacted the work and design ethos of the studio.

Founded by Löfgren, Pettersson and Petrus Palmér in 2005, Form Us With Love is a Stockholm-based design studio, working across product design, consultation and strategy. Growing to become one of the most sought-after names in Scandinavian design, the studio celebrates 18 years in 2023, collaborating with the likes of +Halle, Ikea, Samsung and Muuto, and even launching its own sustainable acoustics company, Baux, in 2014. At the studio’s core lies a process that blends traditional creative practices with strategic, researchdriven application, focusing on problem-solving for real people, and the planet.

The pair have been friends and then colleagues for many years. “We met as friends, drinking beer,” explains Löfgren, before a bad connection forces him to pause. Pettersson fills in with a more pragmatic answer, describing their meeting at industrial design school in Småland, the heart of furniture production in Sweden. “I think a big part of how we both approach design came from visiting production companies [while at Linnaeus University]: you’re bending steel, you’re bending plywood, you’re cutting things. That was one of the most fascinating things for both of us – the industrial process. The other is the curiosity of people – we met as friends, and we like to meet people. That is what design is about, understanding people and how they live and work. That’s where it started, by fusing those two worlds – it’s what Form Us With Love is all about.”

Image on prevIous page:

Jonas Pettersson and John Löfgren aBove Image: Spine chair for Savo

Problem-solving, collaboration and sustainability are the main tenets of FUWL, reflected not only in the final product design but also in the workshops, exhibitions and research the studio undertakes. Prototypa is an experimental forum, first held in 2017 in the studio’s office in central Sweden. Created to move the emphasis away from the polished, finished product and to look inside the important prototyping process – the first visualisation of an idea – the events are open to the public, asking how we can make better creative decisions to learn, to communicate and to collaborate. A success, the studio has held 29 of these events to date, from Stockholm to Milan, Toronto and beyond.

“The definition of our profession when we started was formgivare, which in Swedish is ‘giving shape.’ I think that’s maybe the definition of a designer in many languages and I think that’s such a wrong definition of what we believe the work is,” Pettersson laughs. “That’s a really important part of it, but design is so much more. Everyone has problems in their lives, it could be the smallest thing, like how you do the dishes, or how you get the kids to bed. In a conversation you can pick up problems and solutions, and store them, even for years, then come back to them. As a designer it’s like connecting dots – collecting memories, collecting stories and then saving them for later.”

The studio will bring Prototypa to Stockholm Furniture Fair 2024, a dedicated area for workshops that focus on not only designers but other Scandinavian innovators: in materials, recycling processes and production techniques. “A designer has one role, but I think there are other players that you need to bring into this industry to push it a bit more than just presenting new... shapes,” says Pettersson. “We need to rethink fundamentally how we make things and how things are consumed.”

“It’s our ambition to stir up what a traditional fair can offer,” adds Löfgren. “Could we cross-pollinate with other people with other experiences? Not just presenting another chair in another colour. It’s about meeting and what that meeting could hold.”

It was at Stockholm Furniture Fair where the world first met FUWL, the newly-formed studio launching Cord Lamp, which was picked up by Design Stockholm, marking the studio’s first collaboration. Like much of FUWL’s work, the lamp is simple, functional and playful; a bulb seemingly defying gravity on a cord, the cable that provides its power also supporting it on tables or on the floor. The success of Cord paved the way for countless collaborations, perhaps most notably with Ikea – the now classic Odger chair made using a mixture of 70 per cent recycled polypropylene and 30 per cent reclaimed wood chips. Another hit, Muuto’s Unfold lamp, is a take on the typical industrial lamp shade, made from soft silicone rubber in gentle pastel shades.

“We have never been so into brands, we’re much more into finding the right people,” says Pettersson. “Sometimes that is a very known brand and sometimes it’s someone that no one has ever heard about. We get energy from people that are passionate, that have the resources and that want to push things forward. We think that’s so much important.”

Partnering with the progressive manufacturer +Halle on several products, the studio also helped to develop its Annual Briefing – a series of purpose-driven product development meetings between architects, urban planners, behavioural scientists and cultural entrepreneurs, to better understand public spaces. Each year +Halle invites designers and experts to investigate one specific theme, which provides a narrative and underpins the gathered experts’ opinions. Throughout the year, the teams meet to share thoughts and give feedback. Past meetings have resulted in the likes of Picnic, inspired by an outdoor picnic table, born from the theme Sharing. “During the Annual Briefings, we break the rules of mine and yours,” says Löfgren. “We’re not starting with, ‘this is my idea, and therefore…,’ instead, the process ensures that people can come together and say, ‘hey, can we do this instead?’”

Various pieces of furniture are developed as a result of the briefings, each ‘forged by a collective mind’. This year’s theme, Producing, resulted in Cubicle, a new bench and wall system by FUWL for +Halle that was recently launched at Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign. With spatial comfort and functionality tied strongly to ‘producing’ good work, Cubicle is inspired by a traditional cubicle, such as a compartment seat on a train or library – a hideout and place to relax, to concentrate or escape, despite being out in the open.

“At first, we looked back: everyone had their own room,” says Löfgren. “Imagine just like in Jacques Tati’s film Playtime, but as we began to plan the space for today, the flexibility needed meant that we were left with a series of multiple bench-table-wall structures, still delivering on that same ‘my own space’ notion, but living openly in a network, where pieces appear together through multiple constellations.”

Working so consistently collaboratively, is it important for FUWL to retain a voice, a signature style? “We are quite far from artists,” says Pettersson. “For us our signature is more the approach, the methodology, which no one sees apart from our team. We have a structured way of working and thinking that leads to similarities in our work, but nothing we intentionally style.”

As for the name, there are a few stories to it, including a misspelt postcard. “We wanted to have something that was inclusive and collaborative,” Pettersson notes. “Form is what we do, Us is who we are as a team, With is the ones we collaborate with, and Love is our passion. Maybe that it was not how we thought about it from the beginning, but it’s ended up being so well explained, and it’s how we see design.” opposIte page: Cubicle for +Halle