HELLA, YES

Thirty years into her career, Dutch design star Hella Jongerius proves the best ideas-and objects are those that grow and transform along with us

- HANNAH MARTIN

Knotty macramé-like nets and large ceramic beads cover the worktable at Hella Jongerius's bustling Berlin studio. The eye-catching, unusual material is an evolution of the curtain she hung in the United Nations Delegates Lounge in 2013its beads were made by Royal Tichelaar, the oldest ceramic company in the Netherlands; the knots, a reference to Dutch maritime history. Now she's using similar stuff to dress a series of wood tables and benches that will debut in her November show at Manhattan's Salon 94 gallery.

"The future of good, socially responsible design lies in an evolution of content," reflects the Dutch talent, whose practice has a distinctly circular quality, ideas and materials constantly recycled and reinvented. "I'm always trying to create an object that is not finished. Something that leaves options open for the user to interpret."

This isn't what we've come to expect from industrial designers, those experts we ask to consider function, precision, fabrication and, perhaps above all else, a finished productover abstract objectives like feeling or possibility. But this is what has set Jongerius's work apart from her peers over the decades. Whether she's collaborating with a gallery or with IKEA, she infuses craft and its implicit imperfection into her pieces to "give the object oxygen."