Rebooting the Elements of Modern Design

Some furniture makers use computers to help them design. Others use what’s inside those computers as their design.

San Francisco artist Marcia Stuermer, 41, began incorporating recycled motherboards--the templates on which electronic components are mounted--and other computer circuitry into tables, desks, chairs, screens, lamps, chandeliers, headboards and other home items 10 years ago. She founded Fossil Faux (https://www.fossilfaux.com) based on her belief that today’s computers are tomorrow’s fossils.

Stuermer’s designs have an almost prehistoric sensibility, with a modern twist. Her tables, hand carved from wood, resemble stone slabs. Inlaid within them are computer bits, illuminated with fluorescent lights. For drawer pulls and other furniture hardware, she embeds electronics in brightly colored resin--a modern interpretation of a fly suspended in amber.

“A lot of the computers that we’re using in our pieces are, ironically enough, becoming fossils within the computer technological field,” Stuermer says. It is estimated that up to 13 million computers are retired each year in the United States. Only 10% of those are recycled or reused; about 15% go to landfills or incinerators. As computers become upgraded, Stuermer says, many of the resistors and capacitors she currently uses in her designs are becoming obsolete.

But Stuermer isn’t worried.

“We’ll always find something to reuse and put in there,” she says.

“Anything like this where there is an ample source of materials, and there certainly is an ample source, is going to somehow be felt in design,” says Susan Szenasy, editor in chief of Metropolis, a New York-based architecture and design magazine.

Although Szenasy stops short of calling the use of old computer parts in furniture a trend, she says, “when designers discover material that can be used in interesting ways, it will be used more and more. That’s where ideas about the design world come from--new materials or rediscovered materials that can be used in interesting ways.”

Suzanne Bevan is a Chicago-based interior designer who began incorporating circuit boards into her designs 10 years ago while working on a project for a computer software company.

“I was always doing things I wasn’t supposed to do with materials I wasn’t supposed to use,” she says. “I just found [motherboards] really gorgeous, and everybody that saw them really liked them,” says Bevan, 35.

She and partner Chuck Weaver, 37, co-own Motherboard Inc. (https://www.motherboardinc.com), a company specializing in “cutting-edge home and business products made from unique materials.” That includes small items like mouse pads, day planners, picture frames, clocks, business card holders and clipboards from used computer motherboards. The couple also make custom, computer-inspired “weird furniture” and accessories, like desk blotters and glass table tops that light up around the edges.

The materials they use come from recyclers in the area. Bevan says most of what they get is green.

“That’s the standard kind of color that everybody uses,” she says. But Bevan has also found circuit boards, though less often, in blue, red, purple, yellow and black.

“They look like something they’re not,” Bevan says of their appeal. “They look like a city pattern, or a bug. They’re really fascinating.”

Metropolis magazine’s Szenasy concurs.

“How many of us really look into our computers and see what makes them work?” she says. “We don’t until [we] take it out and see this beautiful pattern that makes it all happen. It’s kind of intriguing to relate to computers on that level.”

As technology advances, so does our need for it--and our need to dispose of it in environmentally conscious and creative ways as old systems become outdated.

“It’s hard to say we’re really making a huge stab at the solution, but every little bit helps,” says Stuermer, who has custom designed pieces for Intel and Lotus Development. “It may be the greatest stab we’re making is putting them out there in front of people conceptually, letting them know that this stuff doesn’t go away.”

For local availability, call Fossil Faux at (800) 941-1935 and Motherboard Inc. at (312) 842-6788.