designer

Björn Steinar Bluemenstein

Björn Steinar is a product designer, currently based in Reykjavík. He is an enthusiastic young designer who strives towards bringing around societal change through his design practice.

Björn is from a generation of product designers; designing into a world over flooded with products and useless temptations. The world is in dire need of solutions to an array of problems, which is why Björn tends towards what he calls an anti-capitalistic design method; honest design practice with real purpose, where no one is screwed over - neither people nor planets.

Recent works include Catch of the day – fighting food waste by handcrafting vodka from dumpster dived fruits – followed by an open source distilling machine, Cargo – an explanation of the world condition from the standpoint of the steel shipping container and banana passport (now on display at the Maritime Museum of Denmark) and last Forest Utility – mobilising Icelandic designers and foresters with a quick-start-guide on how to design from Icelandic wood, to create a culture around utilisation of a new resource in a previously woodless country.

The three research driven projects echo Björn’s vision of using design as a medium for conveying ideas.

Strong simple narratives and expressive simple solutions, combined with closecollaborations, place his local context as a metaphor for the world in a solution oriented dialogue.

Always proposing a solution, no matter how complex the problem.