Young Berlin designers do more with less at Find Attached exhibition

A folding sink and a room divider that provides natural air conditioning feature in Berlin's inaugural Find Attached exhibition, showcasing an arsenal of products from 14 emerging designers that make the most of limited resources.

The emerging design show, founded by Jonas Paul Spieker, Mia Pahl and Jul Gross, took over part of a former 1900s shutter factory during the city's newly minted Currents festival.

For the trio, who met while studying at Berlin's University of the Arts (UdK), the aim was to give a platform to young local designers, who are mostly left out of international design weeks.

"We wanted to take the chance and just show people with a Berlin design connection," Spieker told Dezeen. "Because we thought: there's Milan, there's Copenhagen. But the Berlin design scene is not really shown anywhere in the spotlight."

All of the projects in the show examine, in one way or another, how design can contribute to societal change.

For many of the participating designers, this question was a cause to explore how we can learn to survive and thrive within the boundaries of our planet's limited resources.

Garance Pröbsting created a natural air conditioner that works completely without electricity, simply by wetting a textile divider via an integrated reservoir and allowing air to blow through the slash in the centre.

"This is the oldest air conditioning in the world," Spieker explained during a tour of the exhibition.

Find Attached's own Pahl focused instead on conserving water through the ritual of Katzenwäsche – a German term for a quick sponge bath that literally translates as "cat's wash".

Instead of having seemingly endless water available on tap, her reimagined wash station requires users to fill a two-litre reservoir themselves and collects the wastewater at the end. It's a drastic improvement on the average shower, which consumes 176 litres of water and 6.1 kilowatt-hours of energy.

"You can really save a lot of water if you skip showering," Spieker said. "And you have to collect the water so you can use it, so you are really involved in this process."

Hygiene was also on the agenda for Vloow Design Lab. The studio, run by another trio of UdK students, used scrap truck tarp to create a fold-away sink for small spaces, while Marie Kurstjens designed a reusable menstrual kit for displaced people who lack access to clean water and hygiene products.

Spieker himself looked to challenge the energy consumption and material wastage in the furniture industry with ImPerfekt – a series of CNC-milled wooden furniture, for which he skipped the final perfecting step.

What's left behind are roughly-hewn edges designed to irritate and prompt questions about how much imperfection we're able to tolerate in the pursuit of sustainability.

"Normally you have two steps: so the rough milling and the perfecting step," he said. "And the step to perfect this surface is normally the same amount of time – or even more – and so the same amount of energy again."

"It really asks the question: How acceptable can imperfection be?" he continued.

Traditional manufacturing processes were similarly under the magnifying glass with Esmée Willemsen, who created a customisable coffin using a 3D-printed wood replacement made from sawdust (top image). Nearby, Julia Huhnholz used the same material to create a modular shelving system.

Paul Rees took a more tongue-in-cheek approach and created a series of satirical products for surviving a warming world, including a scarf formed from rubber ice-cube moulds.

Also featured in the exhibition were a compact three-legged chair by Jul Gross, objects made from e-waste by Anna-Maria Argmann, a reimagined smoke detector by Emily Lechaux, experimental lights by Lion Sanguinette, purposefully waterlogged MDF furniture by Emil Löber and Daniel Sauter, and a satirical AI surveillance system by Lukas Henneberger.

The exhibition formed part of the inaugural edition of Currents, founded by local design journalists Laura Ewert and Jasmin Jouhar in the hopes of finally giving Berlin the design festival it deserves.

Other highlights from this year's event included the 20th anniversary exhibition of institutional Berlin design studio Llot Llov and an exhibition by Design Academy Eindhoven graduates together with Kaldewei.

All imagery courtesy of Find Attached.

Currents 2026 took place from 10 to 12 September 2026 at various locations across Berlin, Germany. For other design events around the world, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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