News + Trends

Functional was yesterday: these room dividers are real eye-catchers

10/7/2025

Translation: machine translated

At the "3 Days of Design" event in Copenhagen, Offecct and Ecal showed what the room dividers of tomorrow will look like - and they are anything but ordinary.

Open spaces are all the rage - whether in the office or at home. But as cool as they look, they also come with challenges: how do you divide the space without overwhelming it? A question that the Swedish furniture manufacturer Offecct wanted to answer together with Master's students from the Swiss design school Ecal.

The brief to the students was clear: to develop acoustically effective room dividers that are practical and surprising. «This was precisely the exciting challenge for our students: to rethink these otherwise anonymous partitions and breathe humanity, creativity and humour into them», says Camille Blin, head of the Master's programme in Product Design, in the press release. «This transforms them from purely functional elements into real characters in the shared environment.»

The result? Room dividers that are eye-catching, amusing and thought-provoking. They take familiar shapes and materials and rethink them in an unconventional way.

Fresh ideas for the future

In addition to the look, the focus was on one thing in particular: materials that are clever and durable. The students were encouraged to question traditional approaches. The aim was to create room dividers that inspire both in terms of content and appearance.

One example of this is «Upgrid», which turns waste paper in an open metal grid into sound-absorbing elements. Or «Big Green», a room divider with zigzag upholstery that not only absorbs sound but also catches the eye.

Big Green by Gunnar Kähler. — Upgrid by Hugo Von Hofsten.

For Øystein Austad, Design Manager at Offecct, the collaboration with Ecal was an inspiration: «At Offecct, we see it as our responsibility not only to design functional products, but also to explore new ideas and challenge conventional thinking. The project with the talented students of ECAL - the 'stars of tomorrow' - has given us exactly this opportunity: to find a balance between radical creativity and practical application.»

Pop-up by Wouter Kellens. — Wallpaper by Xose Lois Piñeira.

From quiet to lively: Room dividers with character

The cooperation between Offecct and Ecal shows how much power there is in the combination of experience and fresh ideas. Knowledge meets courage. For us, this means: room dividers that not only make the room quiet, but also bring it to life. Who would have thought that something like this could have so much personality?

Header image: Pia Seidel

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Pia Seidel

Senior Editor

Pia.Seidel@digitecgalaxus.ch

Like a cheerleader, I love celebrating good design and bringing you closer to everything furniture- and interior design- related. I regularly curate simple yet sophisticated interior ideas, report on trends and interview creative minds about their work.

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