Everyday Rituals: Three discoveries from the London Design Festival 2025

Three discoveries from the London Design Festival 2025 that reimagine how everyday objects can connect us to something deeper than just consumption. Instead of creating objects meant to be quickly replaced, these designers create objects that deepen in significance through use, challenging the disposable nature of contemporary material culture.

The WA Table Lamp by Akasaki & Vanhuyse

Tokyo’s Den-en-toshi Line serves more than a thousand daily commuters, each supported by resin handholds. When transport authorities replace these elements, they typically become waste despite years of service. Akasaki & Vanhuyse intervene in this cycle by reclaiming the decommissioned rings and transforming them into lighting.

Each lamp contains nine rings, their surfaces bearing scratches and marks from countless journeys. Rather than erasing this wear, the designers preserve it. Sandblasted to a matte finish and stacked to diffuse a warm glow, the rings reveal the traces of human interaction while filtering illumination into gentle layers.

Switching on the lamp each evening extends the object’s history, linking domestic routine to the collective movement of Tokyo commuters. Even at the end of the lamp’s life, the resin can be separated from the fittings and re-enter another cycle of use.

Sanctum Installation by Heiter

Where the lamp preserves memory, Heiter’s Sanctum reconnects material practice to landscape. Drawing from Estonia’s hiis tradition, sacred forest clearings used for gathering and reflection, Heiter turns to hempcrete, a mixture of hemp fibres and lime, as both a building material and a cultural reference.

Hemp grows rapidly, absorbs carbon dioxide, and has deep roots in Estonian history, once central to rope, sail, and textile production. Mixed with lime, it becomes a sculptural medium that regulates temperature naturally, invites touch, and can return harmlessly to the soil at the end of its life.

Through forms like the Creta vessels and Rauna seating, Sanctum introduces this regenerative cycle into urban contexts, reminding users that materials can sustain rather than diminish the environments they draw from.

BioRock by Oliver Woods

While Heiter looks to soil, Oliver Woods turns to the sea. Off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia, he has developed BioRock, a process that mirrors coral reef formation. Over sixteen months, Woods guided dissolved minerals to settle on metal cathodes through low-voltage electrical currents, slowly building up calcium carbonate structures.

These underwater forms grow at the pace of geology yet provide immediate benefits. They shelter fish, offer surfaces for algae and coral larvae, and even improve water quality. In this way, making becomes ecological care: design that collaborates with natural chemistry to restore rather than consume.

The work requires patience; daily monitoring of currents, close observation of marine life, and sensitivity to oceanic rhythms, reminding us that design can align with the temporalities of living systems rather than industrial speed.

What unites these projects is their invitation to treat interaction with objects as a form of ritual. The WA Table Lamp turns the act of switching on a light into a gesture of remembering shared journeys. The Sanctum vessels and seating root moments of rest within cycles of growth and return. The BioRock structures grow in tune with the rhythms of ocean life.

These objects accumulate meaning through daily engagement. Each encounter reinforces awareness of the systems, urban, terrestrial, and marine, that sustain us.

References: 

BioRock - Oliver Woods

Sanctum - Heiter

WA Table Lamp - Akasaki & Vanhuyse