NYCxDESIGN Week
Designing products for a circular economy
Crafting a Circular Future: A Talk with Carl Hansen & Søn
Date: Wednesday, May 15th
Time: 5pm-8pm; talk starting at 5:30pm
Carl Hansen & Søn has teamed up with Dezeen during NYCxDesign for a talk in the New York showroom about designing products for a circular economy.
Dezeen's US editor Ben Dreith will moderate a discussion between Carl Hansen & Søn head of product development Mads Holm Rabjerg, Rarify co-founder David Rosenwasser and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) sustainability lead Sigal Shemesh.
The talk will explore themes including the use of reclaimed materials in furniture design, adaptive reuse and the impacts of new corporate sustainability rules.
Mads Holm Rabjerg
Head of Product Development at Carl Hansen & Søn
With a background as a Design Engineer, Mads Holm Rabjerg has worked as Head of Product Development at Carl Hansen & Son since 2016. He is leading the inhouse team of Project Managers, Upholsterers, Cabinet makes and Engineers that make visions of a design become a reality. His department is responsible of materials and product compliance, with a high focus on both the environmental impact and the lifespan of the product and the design.
David Rosenwasser
Co-Founder + Co-CEO at Rarify
David Rosenwasser is a Co-Founder of Rarify (rarify.co), a born-digital design store and educational resource, alongside business partner Jeremy Bilotti. As a teenager, he founded D ROSE MOD (drosemod.com), a vintage business focused on authentic and collectible 20th century design. Between these two businesses, they now house approximately 12,000 pieces of furniture across 70,000 square feet of warehouse and showroom space based in Pennsylvania. Prior to his time at Rarify, Rosenwasser was Senior Research Personnel in the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell University. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell, Master in Design Studies in Technology from Harvard’s GSD, and is a Hunter R. Rawlings III Presidential Research Scholar. David and Jeremy are deeply passionate about design, technology, and authenticity, so Rarify is driven by an academic pursuit of knowledge and a desire to cultivate a community of design enthusiasts.
Sigal Shermesh
Associate, Sustainability Lead at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
As a Sustainability Lead at SOM, Sigal incorporates high performance and integrative building design to achieve aspirational sustainability targets. She delivers comprehensive bespoke sustainability roadmaps on a range of projects across different typologies, scales, and geographies. While her expertise spans many topics— including building energy performance, embodied carbon, health and wellbeing—she is particularly passionate about applying a holistic approach to balancing carbon and health impacts of the materials we introduce in our indoor environments and encourages a focus on circularity. She is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia’s GSAPP and The New York City College of Technology, where she lectures on sustainability in the built environment.
