“Design is not about beauty. It’s about how people live.”

An interview with Anastasiia Saveleva, Travel to Art Award 2025 laureate, Best Furniture Designer

1. You received the Best Furniture Designer award at the Travel to Art Award 2025. What does this international recognition mean to you personally — and how has it changed your professional trajectory?

Honestly — my first reaction was surprise. Not because I doubt what I do. I’ve simply always been used to working inside the process, without thinking much about how it looks from the outside. You create an object, you think about the material, about the person who will live with it — and that absorbs you completely. External recognition arrives as something separate. Almost parallel.

But when I found myself at the ceremony in Miami — in the space of Millecento by Pininfarina, surrounded by people who shape the cultural economy literally every day through their work — it became clear that this was not just an award. It was a point of visibility. The jury included Silvia Barisione from The Wolfsonian–FIU, who had worked at MoMA, gallerist Max Voloshin, Omar Lopes-Chahoud — curator of the Venice Biennale. These people don’t evaluate an individual object. They evaluate the system of thinking behind it. And when they say “yes” — it means the system works not only inside your own head.

Afterwards came requests I hadn’t received before. From architects, from educational platforms, from people working in urban design. It turned out Soulcraft is not only about furniture. It’s a language that makes sense in very different contexts. The award worked like a translation: it explained what I do to people who didn’t know they were looking for exactly this.

2. Your Soulcraft methodology brings together sustainable design, biophilic principles, and emotional experience. How did this approach take shape — and what does it contribute to contemporary practice?

Soulcraft didn’t emerge as a concept. It emerged as a response to a specific discomfort.

I was working on a project where a space needed to be furnished. Formally, everything came together correctly — proportions, materials, light. But something wasn’t working at the level of feeling. A person would walk into the room and it wouldn’t “receive” them. I started asking myself: why can design be technically flawless yet emotionally hollow? Searching for the answer, I arrived at three things that became the three axes of Soulcraft.

The first is the relationship to material. The contemporary furniture industry is built on the logic of “new is better than old.” But secondary materials — reclaimed wood, recycled plastic, textile waste — carry a historical density that new material simply doesn’t have. When an object is made from something that has already lived its life, it enters a space differently. It doesn’t claim eternity. It is honest about its past — and this creates an entirely different connection between a person and an object.

The second is biophilia. This is not a decorative device involving leaves and natural textures. It is a far more fundamental principle: humans evolved in a natural environment for five million years, and the nervous system still seeks organic forms, living surfaces, rhythms resembling those found in nature. When design accounts for this — it reduces anxiety, it restores. When it doesn’t — it creates a background tension that people usually don’t consciously notice, but feel constantly.

The third is the emotional presence of an object. We’re accustomed to evaluating furniture by its functions: how comfortable, how durable, how aesthetic. But an object also creates the emotional climate of a space. I began asking not “what will work here” — but “what will support the person.” The difference, at first glance, seems small. In practice — it’s fundamental.

Soulcraft’s contribution to contemporary practice is an attempt to restore to design the question of “why,” which somewhere got lost behind the question of “how.” We’ve learned to make things very beautifully and very technologically. But the meaning of an object — why this material, why this form, what it says about the life of the person living with it — is increasingly left unasked. Soulcraft tries to bring that conversation back to the centre. This is partly why I consider participation in academic discourse important — publishing, peer-reviewing colleagues’ work. Design practice that isn’t theoretically examined closes in on itself. And I want what I make with my hands to be verifiable — in words as well.

3. Author, researcher, entrepreneur — how do you define the role of a designer in the context of the global creative economy? And which of these roles do you actively cultivate?

All three. And that’s not an evasive answer — it’s a description of reality.

Design cannot exist in a single role. An author without a research foundation produces beautiful things that don’t function at the level of a system. A researcher without entrepreneurial thinking creates concepts that never become real objects. An entrepreneur without an authorial voice produces a product — but not culture.

In terms of my own priorities — I begin as a researcher. Before approaching an object, I study the context: who this person is, how they live, what their rhythms are, what depletes them and what restores them. I read work in neuroaesthetics, the psychology of space, sustainable production. Over time, part of this work began to extend beyond my personal practice — I started publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals and reviewing other researchers’ work. It’s a different mode of thinking: when you write yourself, you articulate; when you read someone else’s work critically, you understand where the gaps in your own thinking still are. Both are necessary. A project doesn’t begin with a sketch. It begins with a question.

Then the author comes in — the one who makes decisions about material, form, proportion not from a trend, but from the internal logic of the object and the person it’s being made for.

And there’s the third — entrepreneurial responsibility. A meaningful object has to be reproducible. Soulcraft works with digital prototyping and 3D printing precisely in order not to remain in the niche of singular author pieces. A methodology has to be scalable. Otherwise it’s not a methodology — just a personal style.

The most accurate answer: I develop the researcher role, because it sets the quality of the other two. Weak research — and both the author and the entrepreneur are building on an unreliable foundation.

4. Craft plus digital tools — how does this synthesis support scalability and open up international collaborations?

This is probably the most practical question in our conversation. And one of the most important.

Handcraft and digital technology have long been perceived as opposites. “Craft” meant uniqueness, singularity, irreproducibility. “Technology” meant reproduction, loss of individuality. I consider this a false dichotomy.

In my practice, digital prototyping is a precision tool at the development stage. It allows me to check proportions, ergonomics, the visual perception of an object before I’ve touched the material. It reduces errors and allows me to work with complex forms that would have required many iterations by hand. But the object itself is still handmade. The traces of the hand don’t disappear. They simply appear where they’re needed: in the surface texture, in the joints, in the final finish.

I use 3D printing selectively — for components where precision of repetition is critical. This makes it possible to reproduce a structural element without losing the quality of the object as a whole. And this is precisely what opens up scaling: I can work on collaborations in different countries, sending digital files and knowing the component will be reproduced accurately. Assembly and the final work with material remains manual. That’s what preserves the authenticity.

As for international collaboration — the digital layer makes it logistically possible. But what truly enables collaboration is language. Soulcraft is not simply a set of techniques; it’s a conceptual foundation that makes sense to an architect in Berlin, an interior designer in Tokyo, and a manufacturer in Milan. Notably, a shared language matters more here than shared technology.

I’m currently in conversation with several projects in different countries about exactly this: passing on not an object, but a principle. How Soulcraft might become part of an educational programme. How to integrate it into a commercial project with a sustainable production base. None of this would have been possible if the methodology hadn’t been articulated precisely enough.

5. Design, sustainable development, human wellbeing. How can design become a genuine driver of social change — not at the level of declarations, but in practice?

Design is already a driver of change. We simply don’t always acknowledge it.

Every object that exists in a person’s space shapes their experience. The chair you work in for eight hours. The table the family gathers around in the evening. The shelf you see every day. These are not neutral things — they create a microclimate that affects mood, productivity, the sense of being at home in your own space.

The problem is that design has long developed in the logic of the market, not the logic of the person. “What sells” replaced “what’s needed.” In that logic, a design was born that looks beautiful in a photograph but doesn’t work in life: it ages quickly in terms of taste, is made from cheap materials, replaced in three years. We produce more and more objects that no one will keep. That’s both an ecological problem and a cultural one.

Soulcraft is an attempt to offer a different model. An object made from secondary material, created with attention to how a person will exist with it, doesn’t become obsolete — because it was built not around fashion, but around meaning. This is not nostalgia for “handmade.” It’s a pragmatic alternative to consumer culture.

The social dimension for me is very concrete. I work with people who often don’t think of an interior as a space of self-care. For many it’s secondary — first everything “important,” and home can wait, sometime later. But home is the environment in which you recover. If it is indifferent to you, you don’t truly recover.

Design changes culture slowly. Not through manifestos — through objects. Through the way a person begins to think differently about material, about what they want to keep, about what “well made” means — not “expensive,” but “meaningful.” This shift happens quietly. But it happens.