It is difficult if not impossible to create design that will last without feeling dated. Time goes on, and nobody can predict the future. Certain ideas, however, take this into account by allowing for change. Such is the case with FRAME, a furniture concept designed by Marcus Abrahamsson and Kristoffer Fagerström for Konstfack, the university college of arts, crafts and design in Stockholm. Tackled as their graduate project, FRAME uses a metal base to create benches (and tables). It makes benchability, so to speak (and to somewhat plagiarize an incredibly nonsensical commercial).

FRAME. Designed by Marcus Abrahamsson and Kristoffer Fagerström for Konstfack.

Like Clamp Table, which lends infinite opportunities for fashioning a table, FRAME allows for its fillings—what in fact constructs the bench seat—to be reformed and redone. Created specifically for an outdoor cafe at Konstfack, FRAME sought to answer “how Konstfack could communicate its inner soul in its external space.” What Abrahamsson and Fagerström came up with was furniture of possibility: “With the aim of creating an interdisciplinary space, we have created a framework that lets the space react to influences and allows it to change over time. In the future when the wood content of this framework is worn out it is up to the current students to decide the content. By this we hope that the space will develop into a collage of materials.”

As future classes graduate and as materials change, FRAME will allow for metamorphosis. Konstfack could capitalize on FRAME by changing its contents every decade to encapsulate that era’s aesthetic or innovations in material. The design school now has an informal, plein air gallery. Just recognized by I.D. Magazine as one of “The year’s sharpest products,” FRAME represents a shift in design philosophy that specifically accounts for historical change by providing a built-in allowance for revision, reversal, and revolution.