The Cooper Project (2025)

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The Cooper Project emerges from a curiosity of longevity in design, and explores how time-honored techniques and cultural motifs can lend the object a narrative of cultural familiarity, allowing us to reimagine different object typologies while safeguarding aesthetic longevity and cultural resonance.

Barrel making, or coopering, is a craft present in most corners of the world, making it uniquely familiar to most. This project has influences from Norwegian “lagging” techniques, as well as the Japanese “kioke” craft. In this project the craft techniques get reimagined to reflect our contemporary life, and the practical and aesthetic demands that follow.

Prototyped during a residency in Japan with a master carpenter in the summer of 2025, the stool bridges cultural heritage with Scandinavian clarity. It’s designed for production; the prototype was produced with a traditional “Kanna” block-plane, but the design has since been adapted for industrial production, while maintaining the tactility, material integrity, and durability central to craftsmanship.

The stool has been imagined two ways. The first one has a singular, semi-enclosed space, more closely reminiscent of its barrel-inspired roots. The other is more airy with three openings, referencing the classic kick-step utility stool, often only seen in an industrial context.

The Cooper project is part of a doctoral research project at the Department of Design at the University of Bergen and is still under development. So far it has expanded to stools, tables, lamps, birdhouses and more.

Materials: Japanese Chestnut & quartersawn norwegian pine

Photography: Per Finne

taran neckelmann

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