From June 18 to 20, during Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign 2025, the RE/CRAFT project takes over with a quiet yet powerful force. The exhibition gathers a group of international designers who challenge assumptions about design’s role in society, not through spectacle, but through deeply intentional work. Focused on materiality, sustainability, and the emotional and social dimensions of design, RE/CRAFT brings a fresh perspective to the public.
DESIGN
Founded in New York in 2022, RE/CRAFT operates as both a platform and a philosophy. Its contributors rethink how objects are made, where they belong, and how they shape the environments and communities around them. At this year’s 3daysofdesign, RE/CRAFT presents works from Ruiting Xu, Zheng He, Xixiao Zhang, Minxuan Zhao, and Bo Zhang, each bringing a distinct voice to the shared conversation about structure, function, and the poetics of sustainable design.
Ruiting Xu: Material as Memory
Trained in architecture, Ruiting Xu bridges spatial and object-based design with a focus on subtle transformation and place-based meaning. Her work Unearth consists of three sculptural vases, each pairing a hard geometric exterior with a soft, flowing interior. These objects are meditations on contrast, precision meets irregularity, containment meets release.
In Xu’s hands, the material speaks of erosion, time, and quiet revelation. Her design language offers a form of emotional sustainability, objects that invite repeated interaction, unfolding meaning with each encounter.
Zheng He: Bridging Landscape and Legacy
Zheng He works across disciplines, landscape, jewelry, and preservation, all united by a dedication to cultural storytelling and environmental empathy. Her project The Bridge Between People, sited in Belle Isle Reservation in Massachusetts, is a landscape intervention that brings community, ecology, and architecture into delicate alignment.
A tidal-sensitive pedestrian bridge allows visitors to observe shifting wetland life, encouraging awareness of both natural rhythms and cultural interconnectedness. Like much of He’s work, it blurs the line between utility and poetry, creating space for reflection and cross-cultural exchange.
Minxuan Zhao: Consciousness in Form
Minxuan Zhao, founder of Lesley Studio and Vessel Matrix Corporation, moves outside traditional boundaries of art and design. Her practice captures structures of the subconscious with the clarity of lived form. Self Portain1, a vivid painting shown at RE/CRAFT, acts as a literal map of her internal cognitive process.
Rather than an abstract interpretation, Zhao frames the work as a direct perception, what she sees with her eyes closed. Intuitively balanced and structurally detailed, her visual language offers a new kind of spatial thinking: one rooted in awareness, emotion, and neurological form.
Xixiao Zhang: Responsive Urban Design
Based in California, Xixiao Zhang brings architectural precision and technological adaptability into RE/CRAFT with her piece Kinetic Catalyst. Designed as a sculptural table lamp model, the work responds to both environmental conditions and user behavior. It’s a microcosm of Zhang’s larger architectural work, which focuses on sustainable urban solutions and user-centered systems.
Through elegant engineering and sensitivity to energy and motion, Kinetic Catalyst becomes a living structure, a compact example of what responsible, responsive design can offer in the urban context.
Bo Zhang: Reflections in Motion
As curator of the RE/CRAFT exhibition, Bo Zhang shapes both its vision and its physical presence. His own contribution, Ripples, explores visual and spatial distortion through a surreal collection of reflective forms. The work challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with space, how movement, light, and material affect our perception of the built environment. Beyond aesthetics, Zhang’s work functions as commentary: on sustainability, on fragility, and on the unseen structures that shape public life.
At the heart of RE/CRAFT is a desire to bring design closer to people, not through simplification, but through relevance. By working across disciplines and materials such as stone, concrete, metal, fabric, and glass, the exhibition foregrounds the tactile, emotional, and systemic dimensions of design. It pushes back against the notion of the object as isolated or elite. Instead, it sees each piece as part of a wider ecology, of cities, of memory, of movement.
In a cultural moment saturated with spectacle, RE/CRAFT offers something else: design as reflection, as care, as action. These works don’t shout, they resonate. And in doing so, they invite us to reconsider not just what design looks like, but what it does, and who it’s truly for.
For those navigating the packed program of 3daysofdesign, RE/CRAFT presents a moment of stillness and intent, where sustainability isn’t an aesthetic, but a principle, and the future of design is already quietly taking shape.
Words by Jana Kostic.
