Photo: Robin Plaskoff Horton, Urban Gardens.

I love designs that multitask which is why I am in love with Pre\serve, a dining collection that is a combination indoor herb garden, receptacle for storing vegetables, and cooler. The multifunctional table features an ages-old evaporative cooling technology to keep food and beverages chilled.

Photo: Robin Plaskoff Horton, Urban Gardens.

Brooklyn industrial designer Elisia Langdon addresses notions of sustainability by questioning what she views as a contemporary contradiction between total dependence upon our belongings and a throw away culture that undervalues the physical object.

Photo via the designer.

Langdon seeks to influence the ways in which we interact with our environments by approaching design from both a material and systems perspective. She proposes a sort of reciprocal relationship between object and user by creating furniture that functions as the “facilitator of habits and routines.”

Photo via Stockholm Furniture Fair.

To promote sustainable living, Langdon incorporates ecological technologies such as aquaponic gardening and evaporative cooling into her contemporary furniture design.

Photo via Stockholm Furniture Fair.

“Much of today’s approach to environmental sustainability is about saying ‘no,’ observes Langdon. “It focuses on minimizing impact, eliminating things one is used to having or doing. However, without alternatives to old systems and routines, there is no way forward.” She believes that design is how we create the alternatives we need in order to change society.

Photo via Stockholm Furniture Fair.

I spotted Pre\Serve at the Stockholm Furniture and Light Fair in February 2017. Langdon was one of 30 independent designers selected to exhibit their work at Greenhouse, the fair’s platform for up-and-coming designers and design schools to showcase prototypes to future partners, producers, and customers.

Langdon graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied industrial design and sustainability, and during a junior semester abroad at Linnaeus University in Sweden extended her studies in furniture design. The young designer has a history of sustainable design thinking: for her senior project in high school, Langdon designed and built a tree house where I think Pre/serve would be totally at home.