Listen to the audio version of this article. Duration: 14 minutes.

In this interview, Brazilian industrial designer Rodrigo Brenner shares how his creative approach merges nature, sustainability, and design. Brenner highlights how innovation often comes from unexpected intersections, where diverse ideas and worlds overlap. With his work rooted in his Brazilian heritage, he blends a poetic vision with practicality, creating award-winning designs that push the boundaries of sustainability while keeping a human touch at the core.

“When we manage to combine nature’s intelligence with human creativity, we can create something sustainable”

Second Sun is a speculative design project focused on sustainability, designed in collaboration with Cesar Pieri.

Tell us about your design philosophy, your vision and what inspires you in your everyday work.

I founded Furf Design Studio 13 years ago in Curitiba, a beautiful city in Brazil, together with Mauricio Noronha. The city is famous for its urban planning and the hybridisation between the urban aspect and nature. When you’re born in Brazil, nature is always a very strong subject. This is something that fascinates us Brazilians a lot, as we’re always looking at nature for inspiration. If there’s one thing we truly believe in, it is that nature is way more intelligent than the human race, yet as a human race we are very creative. When we manage to combine nature’s intelligence with human creativity, we can create something sustainable. This is a big topic in everything we do, especially in industrial design. We are known for embedding the poetic aspect of design in our work, always looking to make it symbolic in some way, even in the most creative projects. When presenting something new, or innovative, there must always be some familiar factor, that’s why we try and find some connection through symbols, iconic elements, so we come up with something poetic, yet with a strong focus on the business side as well. That’s what throws people off sometimes about us, since one generally believes that either you’re a crazy, totally creative artist or you’re a suit and tie type and try to stick to business. For us, the more poetic the product, the more likeable it will be for consumers, hence it will sell more. It’s a power designers have, to bestow some moments of poetry upon the daily life of consumers, and it’s something I love. In a nutshell, our design is as poetic as it is business driven, and always looking for the symbolic aspect. For us, this is what design is all about.

Do you experiment with materials?

Let me take a step back: I’m currently living in Milan, to expand the company here. As a matter of fact we have already branched out in 25 countries, though our background is still mainly focused on Brazil. It’s a huge country, and nature there is very pervasive, “plurale” in the sense of diverse, and inclusive, too. Take a small portion, as tiny as it can be, of the amazon forest: you will find thousands of different possible materials, textures, living creatures, all coexisting in a harmonious way. It took me a while to realise this, even though I travelled around the world, but in the end this is a very Brazilian thing, something that’s in our DNA. We don’t believe in the idea of “exclusive” design, of elitist design, we always try to be as inclusive as possible. Regarding materials and experimentation: we are always open to try new materials. We worked on medical devices, furniture, houseware, even a sailboat and a funeral urn, and we used wood, metal, all kinds of polymers and plastics: we loved it, and tried to see the beauty of each of the materials and used them with a lot of respect. Also, we love to use new materials, especially bio-based materials. For instance, we worked with a fabric made out of leaves, so it’s a bio-fabric, a kind of plant-based leather, but it really looks and feels like leather! It’s amazing because it looks like a leaf! In fact it is a leaf, some people think we made some kind of synthetic leather and printed a leaf pattern on it.

“It’s a power designers have, to bestow some moments of poetry upon the daily life of consumers, and it’s something I love”

Sail is a mycelium-based affordable funerary urn that recently won the IF Design Award for its innovative approach.

But it’s a real leaf. It’s really cool. Also we’re working a lot with mycelium. It’s part of a fungus and it’s a really sustainable material in terms of Carbon footprint. It can be used in thousands of different ways. We’ve already done some furniture with it, panels, lamps, but the one project that got the most attention, and even won an IF award in the process, is a funeral urn. It’s biodegradable, and it also works as a fertiliser. It all has a very very positive feel and impact, but it’s not because we work with mycelium that we vilify plastic. Quite on the contrary, I’m not allowed to say much more about the project, but we just signed a contract with an important Italian brand, very famous for plastic.

Fiore is Furf’s first project designed and produced in Milan, It is a 3D printed planter for street furniture made of biodegradable polymer launched during Milan Green Week 2024.

What’s your take on sustainability in design?

A few years back, there was a big trend called “designer-think”, and literally it meant “what designers think”, and it was all over the place. The same goes with sustainability, all of a sudden, everybody started talking about it: “oh my god, we have to be sustainable!” But designers have always done it, without the need to even mention it. Look at the work of Achille Castiglioni from decades ago, or that of Dieter Rams. These guys were already talking about sustainability a long time ago. Today sustainability is part of the package of any good design, not an added feature to brag about.

Flora is a playful twist on the traditional table lamp, launched during Milan Design Week 2024.

Made with leaf-based biofabric, Autumn stool presents a futuristic approach to sustainability.

As someone who came to this city from the other side of the world, what’s your perspective on Milan and its design scene?

When you think about design, the first place that comes to mind is Italy. When studying in Turin, I could really feel it in my skin. In Brazil, design is still in its infancy, full of opportunities. In Brazil, you’d have to visit the homes of the very wealthy to see good design, whereas here in Italy, good design is everywhere. You live it, breathe it, and spend your entire day immersed in it. Here, you learn good design by osmosis. This is what fascinated me in the first place. After studying in Turin, after founding our design studio in Curitiba, after exhibiting at Milano Design Week for about ten years, I came to realise that Milano is indeed the biggest stage for design. Things that are created here echo everywhere in the world. There’s a different aura to creating and working here, not only with Italian companies but also and especially with international companies. Something I observed working here is that, though Milan is the world’s stage for design, it’s also a very small stage. This is cool. Things are happening here. Business is not necessarily better, but it’s different. A different lifestyle, a different approach to design. That’s exciting, and inspiring. Milan is the epicentre of the design world, I have no doubts about it.

Confetti, the world’s first mass-produced prosthetic leg cover, is multi-awarded and currently available in over twenty countries.

What’s your vision about the kitchen, and food in general?

I’ve always been fascinated by rituals and ceremonies, especially those of the Amazon’s native cultures. When you consider what a ceremony is really about, you realise it’s made of a succession of steps that involve the use of a number of artefacts. We as a human race are performing rituals and ceremonies everyday, constantly. They are embedded in our daily lives. There’s no doubt that one of the most important ceremonies here in Italy is about food. What I find amazing here is the tremendous focus on technique combined with the use of few but very high quality ingredients. I find this mindset also applied to design: a strong focus on the best process, avoiding any unnecessary feature and using only top quality elements. You can see this everywhere in Italy, especially in the houses. Ovens, freezers, refrigerators, pans, cutlery that are part of this daily ritual and made here in Italy really show the care taken in their design. They are more functional, more fun and pleasant to use. I want to cook more when I’m in Italy, not only because of the amazing food but also because of the tools I use. Somehow they work better.

How would the rich Brazilian food culture influence you in your food tastes?

In Turin, I lived in student accommodation with people from all over the world. We shared a kitchen and cooked together, each preparing their own dishes. The thing about Brazilian food is that we don’t have anything truly original to it. What’s really traditional for us in Brazil is to mix different cultures on the same plate. We love to mix, we are not “pure” nor “purists”. This happens in design too: with respect to Italy, Brazilian design is not “pure”. When experimenting with carbonara, I finally struck the perfect recipe, and when an Italian friend tasted it, he immediately liked it, but was still unconvinced. “Tastes good, but did you use pecorino romano cheese?”, “yes”, “did you use guanciale?”, “yes”, “did you use freshly ground pepe nero?”, “yes”, “did you use fresh eggs?”, “yes”, “did you use anything else?”, “no”. “Good, that’s all right, but still you are not Italian, so this can’t be a carbonara!”.

“In Brazil, you’d have to visit the homes of the very wealthy to see good design, whereas here in Italy, good design is everywhere.”

Graziosa armchair is the result of a collaboration with Natuzzi Editions.

What’s your view on AI?

We always try to implement new technologies, softwares, new tools to make our projects better and faster. AI is something very new, and since last year we started implementing different AI tools. Every day we are using some form of AI to assist us. It’s certainly different from anything we knew before. Sure, you can decide to be old school and be creative without using AI, but to me it wouldn’t make sense: just as we look at nature and get inspired from it, we can use AI as a tool, and a powerful one, too. I can say that today we are designing faster, and better, thanks to AI. Of course we never have anything 100% designed by AI. We make a joke of it, but AI already took the jobs of a lot of interns here at the Studio. Typically interns would, for example, finish sketches, do research, edit pictures or videos, even come up with suggestions, but AI can do all this better, and way faster. They say AI is on a geometric progression learning curve, it’s getting quicker and better every day, and I really don’t known what’s going to happen in 10 years. Who knows, it might become dangerous at some point, but for now it’s something we love using.

Drop, a gadget developed for National Geographic, detects and reports anomalies in rainwater quality, related to pollution.

What is your definition of innovation?

I think it was Steve Jobs who once said “innovation is about connecting the dots”. This is very true, but personally I think innovation, more than connections, is about intersections, the common ground between different worlds. If they don’t intersect, any connection would be fabricated, artificial, not a natural one. If on the other hand there is an intersection, that space has something golden about it. All the coolest innovations in the recents years, even Jobs’s, were not “connections” but “intersections”. Jobs acted as a catalyst between these different worlds. The role of the designer is precisely that, of being a catalyst, finding those intersections and expanding them. This is what we’re trying to do, and this is what all good designers have always done.

Her Code - the iconic perfume packaging - is one of the company’s bestsellers, with millions of units sold.

“Innovation, more than connections, is about intersections, the common ground between different worlds”

The world’s first commercial facade made with mycelium for a gelateria in Brazil is both ludic and sustainable.

Bio

Rodrigo Brenner is a Forbes Under 30 multi-awarded industrial designer from Curitiba, Brazil, and co-founder of the internationally recognised Furf Design Studio, together with Mauricio Noronha.

He studied design at PUC-PR in Brazil and furthered his education at Politecnico di Torino in Italy. Known for his innovative and sustainable approach, Brenner has worked on projects in over 20 countries, infusing his designs with humour, social responsibility, and poetic storytelling. A TEDx speaker and lecturer for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), he also teaches and develops design specialisations at Centro Europeu. His work has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Red Dot Best of the Best and iF Design Award, and is showcased in international museum collections.

furf.it

Copyright © Homa 2025

All rights reserved