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Studio
Alissa van Asseldonk & Nienke Bongers
Alissa and Nienke design innovative materials for interiors that contribute to people’s well-being. Think of tactile walls, anti-burnout wallpapers, and lamps that mimic nature for luxury hotels, as well as schools and healthcare facilities. Together with experts, they also research how a space can influence feelings of happiness and stress.
In Western societies, adults spend an average of 80 to 90% of their time in indoor spaces, mainly in houses, offices, stores, or modes of transport. As a result of mass production, flat materials are increasingly being used to furnish these spaces. This lack of aesthetics and sensory stimuli can contribute to mental health problems, such as stress and burnout.
Three years after participating in the first Secrid Talent Podium, we speak with Nienke and Alissa, about their love of research and experimentation, the magic of natural stimuli on our senses, and their ambitions in the social sector.
Hi Nienke and Alissa, it’s great to talk to you about your latest designs. Let’s start at the beginning. As little girls, did you dream of becoming designers?
Alissa: “Well, I was one of those girls who would always be making things out of whatever I could find. Let’s just say my parents never had any wastepaper in the house. With my mother, I would always visit the Graduation Show at the Design Academy, which was like Valhalla to me. But I had never really thought of doing anything creative. That wasn’t on my radar at all. I was in the academic track in high school, so I thought I would go into medicine.”
Nienke: “Everyone also told me to study medicine, but I really didn’t like that at all. As a very small child, I was always making things and sewing. Those are the kinds of things my mother taught me. So, I thought I was going to be a fashion designer.”
Neither of you became doctors, but you did end up in healthcare. How did that happen?
Alissa: “After high school, I was unable to decide. There were so many things I liked. Thanks to my drawing teacher, I had started considering a more creative path as an option. After a lot of meandering, I was finally eliminated from medicine and admitted to the art academy in Breda, so that’s what I started doing.
I thought it was amazing. After Breda, I moved onto the Design Academy in Eindhoven, where I enrolled in the Man and Well-being program. In other words, designing for people’s well-being, which at that time was under the guidance of Ilse Crawford.”
Nienke: “After high school, I did a preliminary course at ArtEZ in Arnhem, because I wanted to go into fashion. I really liked working with textiles, but over time I felt less and less attracted to the fashion world. It seemed competitive, repetitive, and focused on production. I liked material research and conceptual work more, where I could still come up with anything.
That’s also why I joined the Design Academy, which is where I ended up joining the same program as Alissa. That’s how I started focusing on the role of materials on how we feel in a space.”
We spend about 80% of our time indoors.
You now run a design studio together. How did you get to know each other?
Alissa: “We met through mutual friends. That was in our last year at the academy. We also both went on internships that year. That’s when the need arose to create things for ourselves, instead of working for a company. We started meeting up and doing all kinds of things together, especially material experiments.”
Nienke: “Yes, we did that in the smallest room of my old house. At the very beginning, we started experimenting with ceramics, mixing porcelain colours together. We made tableware for cute little coffee bars, for example. That’s kind of a funny story.”
A funny story. Tell us more.
Alissa: “We rolled from one thing into another. At a party, a friend asked us if we wanted to make three hundred cups for a coffee shop, with which he would be going to Salone del Mobile in Milan. We were still at the academy, and we were very green and naive. We happily threw ourselves into it, but of course, it was really hard work. And there we were in Milan, and the ball started rolling.”
Nienke: “Suddenly, there were magazines that wanted to publish about our tableware and stores that wanted to sell it. It got bigger and bigger. Before we knew it, we were producing ceramics, but that wasn’t at all what we wanted to be doing. Our strength and our pleasure lie in experimentation. We love research, the creative process, and innovation. And that had ended. That’s when we started steering things into a more defined direction.”
What is the focus of your experiments and creations now?
Alissa: “We have two directions that flow together: well-being and materials. Human well-being is our theme. We like to reflect on how a space can have a positive impact. This is what we want to contribute to and research, together with all kinds of experts.”
Nienke: “And we do material research, with which we want to increase that well-being. We develop materials that stimulate the senses in a natural way. With this, we want to help people relax and distract them from stress, allowing them to recharge their mental batteries. Here, too, we collaborate with a lot of experts. This gives us access to many different techniques, which has enabled us to develop many innovative materials.”
Alissa: “One such example is our anti-burnout wallpaper, which is a 3D wallpaper that you can pick at and fidget with to feel more grounded and arrive at different kinds of conversations. A few other fun examples are a felt wall, which makes a different sound in each spot, so you can create a melody together; a shading system that opens like a flower; and a comfort wall that is soft to the touch and reassuring.”
Do you see a problem when it comes to material use and human welfare?
Nienke: “We don’t really think from a problem, but from the possibilities of a material. However, through our work, we have come to see how valuable materials are in the spaces we use.”
Alissa: “I think we spend about 80% or even more of our time in an indoor space, usually inside a building. That’s an incredible amount. With the increasing use of mass-produced materials, those buildings look and feel tighter and flatter, and they often sound that way. We’re surrounded by fewer and fewer natural elements, such as organic forms, wind, light, and sound.
We believe that this lack of sensory stimuli and aesthetically pleasing materials impacts our health. We also conduct research into this, for example with the Eindhoven and Delft universities of technology. And we are increasingly involving behavioral scientists in our projects. We really want to be able to prove on an increasingly larger scale that material use and spatial design can influence feelings of happiness or increase stress and burnout symptoms.”
How do your materials help reduce stress and burnout symptoms?
Alissa: “A lot of our work is inspired by nature, for example a dancing fire or rippling water. You can look at those for hours. In environmental psychology, they call this ‘soft fascination’. It comes from the so-called Attention Restoration Theory, which states that the environment plays an important role in reducing stress and mental fatigue.”
Nienke: “We bring that magic of nature indoors. Not by hanging up a picture of a tree, but by imitating the effect of rustling leaves, for example. That experience can also be created by, for example, using a very large wall of wafer-thin, tiny pieces of stainless steel that move in the wind.
In this way, we are continuously exploring new materials. ‘What does something look like when viewed from this angle?’ ‘What does light, reflection, or a gust of wind do to a surface as it moves?’ ‘How does it feel?’ We play with that. Sometimes we place an object or an installation at one location, but we prefer to set up an entire space or building.”
You can watch rippling water for hours.
In other words, you create a natural experience in a space. What kind of places do you furnish?
Nienke: “We focus on spaces where a lot of people can experience something. The materials we create are quite expensive, which is why they often end up in fancy hotels or expensive boutiques. This is a way for us to keep developing. Because afterwards, we also try to apply our materials in healthcare and schools. Offices are also interesting places for us.”
Alissa: “That cross-pollination is quite a long road, but it’s getting better. We do quite well in the luxury industry, but the healthcare industry is not a very easy area. It’s a question of money. The great thing is that, by now, we’ve been doing this work for so long that we have a lot of materials in our toolkit. We make use of that, which is making it easier and easier to transition into that social domain as well.”
Can you give an example of a luxury material that has also been used in schools or healthcare?
Alissa: “A good example is the Bio Mirror, which is a wall that exhibits a breathing movement. We developed that with a research group from the Eindhoven University of Technology to reduce stress. When you sit down in front of it, you can link up your breathing to a proven calming breathing rhythm. Inspired by this, we also just created very beautiful lamps that have a calming effect on employees and students: the Breathing Light.”
Nienke: “That started with the director of a high school community, who wants to help reduce stress among students. We just so happened to be doing materials research on LED light, together with Tom Bergman, who is very good at programming with that. We could put that to good use to create something which, instead of expensive wallpaper, can’t be demolished by rowdy teenagers.”
How does such a Breathing Light work at a high school?
Alissa: “These lamps are quite large objects, 90 centimeters in diameter. They work with color spots, which move randomly, according to an algorithm. Those colors and movements are based on the soft fascination I was talking about earlier, that restorative and soothing power in nature. On top of that,certain light colors exhibit a breathing rhythm. These glow and fade at a rhythm that we have tested with students.”
Nienke: “There are now 13 of these lamps at 13 different schools. In most cases, we have positioned the lamp in a way that several students can see at the same time, for example in a study room. But at a special education vocational school, we hung it in a small safe room where students can go to retreat. In this way, you can turn a detention room into a care space where you can go regain your composure.”
Are you planning to scale up this kind of innovation?
Nienke: “We think it’s important that our Breathing Light can contribute to the health of many kinds of people. This means we do take scalability into account in our design. However, we happily leave the production, refining, and bringing to market of our products to others.”
Alissa: “By now, we have gathered an entire network of producers. For the Breathing Light, we’ve also been working with a producer from the beginning, who can hopefully start making the lamp for more and more schools, as well as for other audiences.”
Nienke: “Our growth lies much more in the different things we do and the multitude of techniques we use. Therefore, for us, scaling up is about finding the right partners with whom we can develop new materials and increasingly large-scale projects, rather than producing or selling a lot of things ourselves.”
What other partners would you like to attract to grow?
Alissa: “We would love to expand our network in schools and healthcare. We receive a lot of interest in our projects, but it is often still difficult to convince these kinds of institutions of our added value. We are increasingly working on that now.”
Nienke: “Last year, for example, we set up a corridor in the oncology department of the Elisabeth-Tweesteden Hospital in Tilburg. The goal of our work there is to use sensory distraction to reduce patients’ anxiety and stress before treatment and improve the sense of connection with staff and visitors.
We worked with sensory curator Justine Kontou in this project, to add elements like colour and smell. And just like in the schools, we linked our own qualitative research to this, along with behavioural scientist Renske Bongers. With these results, we hope to expand into more spaces, such as waiting areas and eventually patient rooms. But to really demonstrate our value properly requires much larger-scale research, and as a small studio, we don’t have the money or capacity for that.”
Alissa: “This is why we are also looking for research parties that want to help prove and quantify the impact of our work with a large-scale study. For example, we want to be able to show that our Breathing Light not only works in schools, but also in hospitals. And we simply want the numbers. If, for example, we can show that 3% of patients return home earlier than they do now, the Breathing Light suddenly becomes a healthcare product. Alongside the care provided by doctors and nurses, it then really pays off.”
Certain light colours exhibit a breathing rhythm.
What does it take to set up such large-scale research?
Nienke: “We want to talk to the director. At present, we’re mostly in conversation with art committees, but we need executives from healthcare institutions who have access to alternative funding streams and who can make decisions for larger projects.”
Alissa: “A chicken-and-egg problem, however, is that it is quite difficult for healthcare institutions to find money that they are allowed to spend on these kinds of projects. For example, we are in talks with several government grant providers. They are interested in funding half of such a large study, if we can find a market party to invest in the other half. But that market party cannot yet be receiving government money, which means schools and healthcare institutions are excluded. Anyone who has a clever solution for this is welcome to come forward.”
How do you envision the future?
Alissa: “We have a sunny disposition toward the future. It’s actually an incredibly fun time. It is clear to me that well-being is becoming more and more relevant and is being picked up more widely. An increasing number of designers are working with our themes, more and more clients want to pay for our work, and we are also increasingly being asked for new research projects by universities and colleges.
I hope that, as a result, our projects will increase in size and be at larger-scale locations, allowing us to make an ever-growing contribution.”
Nienke: “Yes, I think we really just want to continue what we are doing now, but with more and more connections and research in the world of healthcare.”
In closing, what is the main message you want to convey?
Nienke: “Looking back, we as designers were able to mess around for quite a long time to arrive at what we really enjoy and find important. Those times seem to have changed now. Designers, and people more broadly, have to perform more and more in less and less time and with less money. We don’t think that contributes to our well-being.
People need breathing room to arrive at something good. In any case, we hope to make a small contribution to that with our designs.”
Alissa: “I sometimes wonder what I would have gone on to do if I had made a different choice. If, for example, I had become a doctor after all. Perhaps, in this day and age, I can have the biggest impact on people’s health as a designer.”
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