Cosset

November - 2024

Cosset is a flat-pack stool made from bending plywood and felted wool, designed for tool-less assembly. It highlights the unique properties of felted wool while celebrating the role of regenerative agriculture through thoughtful material choices. Simple and ergonomic, Cosset invites a deeper connection between sustainability and environmental stewardship.

Made out of red oak, bent ply laminate, and wool felt.

Cosset began as a project about regenerative design. While many designers talk about sustainability as a design goal, we are unfortunately at a point where sustaining our current consumption and emissions is not enough, so it is our responsibility to look past sustainability and onto regenerative practices.

My point of entry for this was regenerative agriculture, I wanted to see how I could contribute towards the practice while increasing value for the farmers involved. I come from a family of ranchers, so I thought this would be an interesting way to become more aware of my family history.

Regenerative agriculture cuts out certain practices that are common in standard agriculture, like synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and seasonal tilling of the soil. These practices, while in some ways are very practical, deplete the soil of its microbiomes and damage its fertility over time, leading to lower yields and permanently scarred pieces of agricultural land. The pesticides damage water reservoirs and the practice overall contributes massively to the carbon that is released into the atmosphere.

Regenerative agriculture does away with all of that. Instead it mimics natural and indigenous land management techniques to not only remediate soil quality, but also maximize crop production. The techniques involved actively sequestering carbon into the soil and improving the health of the land and the people that eat from these farms.

A core element of regenerative ag is the use of animals to graze the land. They process the cover crops into natural fertilizer and balance the soil. Farmers often use alpacas or sheep for this purpose. These grazing animals produce high quality, organic fibers, and I thought that this would be a compelling place to intervene as an industrial designer.

I attended a gathering at a regenerative farm in upstate New York and was able to learn hands-on about the materials and the practices behind them.

It was interesting because I was the only industrial designer there, everybody else was working with textiles and clothing. Furniture felt like a more durable and long-lived application, one that could sequester material value over decades rather than seasons, aligning better with the long-term thinking of regenerative land stewardship. I knew at this point I wanted to make a piece of furniture and that I wanted it to be mostly made of wool, but that was as far as I had gotten.

Cold water

Hot water

Soapy water

Dry

Raw wool

Raw wool w/ water

I started to experiment with hand felting. I tried a few different methods which overall gave similar results. I used raw wool and processed wool, just playing with the material to try and build dimensional and structural forms.

What makes wool such a great material is that it’s rot resistant, water resistant, biodegradable, and tough. For something like furniture, it ticks a lot of boxes. Its fiber structure makes it able to be felted, this means locking in the individual fibers by rubbing it or poking it together, and it creates a tough, singular textile. Often this is used in crafts, but I wanted to apply it to furniture on a larger scale. This quickly introduced a tension between the craft-based methods traditionally associated with felt and the scalability required for furniture, which became a central challenge of the project.

I also experimented with needle felting, where you repeatedly poke wool into itself, basically clumping it up into a durable and solid form. This was fun and worked well, but wasn’t going to be feasible to create what I wanted to make, it was too arduous and manual.

The next thing I tried was an attempt to amp up production. I bought premade, wool dryer balls online in bulk and then cut them into cubes on a bandsaw. This then gave me building blocks that I could needle felt together, opening up the possibilities further towards my goal. I ended up making some bigger cubes, and while it was a novel idea and helped push the project forward, it still was lacking in scale.

It furthered my understanding of the material, and helped make my path forward more clear. I wasn’t just going to sculpt something out of nothing, but I now had a building block that I could envision working off of, which kept things pushing forward.

I began sketching some concepts of forms using felt blocks or balls. I was interested in how I could use the inherent softness of wool as something more than just a cushion, that seemed too easy. I began asking whether softness could coexist with structure, and whether density and curvature could replace rigid framing.

I made dozens of cardboard models. It helped me understand the scale and proportions of what I was trying to make, and how the felt would be integrated into the piece.

I was still figuring out how to get the thickness I needed for functional furniture made of felt, but then I had a major breakthrough when I found industrial quality felt. This felted wool material is used in heavy machinery in vibration absorbing and dampening, and it’s insanely dense. It feels like MDF, but is still flexible, and can be cut with a normal exacto knife blade. So I immediately ordered some and considered how I could apply it to my purposes.

I had this super dense felt laying in my room for a few days while I figured out what to do with it - it was so cumbersome to get around because it couldn’t fold up or tuck away at all.

And that’s when it hit me.

I could roll it up partially and because it doesn’t want to bend or crease, it had enough structure to function as a stool! Its resistance to buckling, combined with its high friction and compressive strength, allowed it to hold a curved geometry under load.

I cut some into a small strip and clamped it together, and it worked just enough for me to see the next steps.

The next day I got some foam to experiment with my idea.

What I wanted to do was clip the two sides of the curved felt together. I had hoped this would be enough to keep the whole thing stable, and it had a side effect of being easily broken down into a flat pack design. I tried a few different designs, each time learning more about the capacity of the material.

My first idea was to use a metal clip, I thought that this would be super sleek and minimal, while keeping the wool ends locked in place together. Unfortunately it was not tough enough and bent outward immediately. I learned that I needed to not only prevent it from splaying out side to side, but also up and down.

My next experiment was to use a material I hadn’t used before, bending ply. I made a quick bending jig and got to work gluing and clamping it all together, and I nailed it on the first try (with some help). With that and a redesigned base plate, I was able to get a functional prototype put together that was strong enough to hold a fully grown man’s full weight. I was stoked at this point, but I could tell that the proportions were way off. At this point, this was a seat for a child, so I scaled it up. I also fixed some elements in the wood pieces to make them line up better in the base.

The bending plywood became a quiet counterpoint to the wool. Rigid where the felt was soft and precise where it was organic, creating a material dialogue.

I also simplified the base, rather than being two pieces that had to attach together in the middle like in the cardboard version, it was now one piece where the wool slid over. This became an important design parameter, minimizing the part count.

The next version was a decent bit bigger, scaled up to the size of an adult. This meant it was not only taller, but wider too. I also added a straight bit to the bent pieces at the bottom, which made it fit much more securely into the base.

This version of the base was also made out of real wood, rather than plywood. I laser cut a router template and went to town cutting out the slots for the wool and the arches. I hadn’t used hardwood very much at this point and learned an important lesson in grain direction and strength. The parts that were sticking out immediately snapped off, so I had to domino on some repairs with the grain going the proper direction.

I drilled out some holes for dowels and cut some slots in the bent pieces for everything to slot into place. I wanted to avoid hardware and tools for the assembly of this stool. I wanted the assembly to feel intuitive and repairable, closer to traditional joinery than disposable consumer products. This reinforced the project’s emphasis on longevity and care.

It also kept the part count down, ultimately coming up to a total of four pieces. The wool piece sliding on keeps everything held together nice and snug.

Later on I would come back and reenforce the bottom, and add hidden wooden feet for stability. I wanted the wool ends to act as feet, but they were too squishy.

Overall I’m really satisfied with this project. I think that between streamlining the part count to four, the toolless assembly, and the whole thing being flatpack came together really seamlessly. The next steps would be to refine some of the details on the base to be manufactured on a cnc, and maybe change the material to plywood with edge banding, it’d be stronger and cheaper to produce.

The stool itself is very comfortable, and has held up to many guests trying it out. The arc of the wool is really charming and it feels humble, yet luxurious.

Cosset ultimately became a way to give physical presence and value to a material that supports healthy land systems. Reframing an agricultural byproduct into something structural.

The name Cosset means “mid 16th century as a noun denoting a lamb brought up by hand“.

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