Fun Stuff Design

Hello. We are Dierdre and Julian from Fun Stuff Design. For the past few years, we have been flying under the radar but we want to start sharing more about what we are up to. So here we go! We are an industrial design studio that specializes in bringing novel and sustainable materials into the world through material development and product design. We like to get our hands dirty, make a lot prototypes and dive into manufacturing techniques. We feel an urgency around bringing healthier, regenerative, and circular materials into our everyday objects in a real and impactful way. Hello!

We were invited by our friends @howtechfeels to write a short essay about renovating a small, old industrial building in Troy, NY to be our studio. It is a project we are just getting to the end of, a three year process that has been both discouraging and triumphant and everything in between. There was so much we wanted to say in this essay. Thank you, Dan, for helping us distill it to the essence. Renovating this building to be our studio was a total leap of faith, one that we’re still wrapping our heads around. Writing this essay felt like writing a love letter to our family, our creative practice, and the community that made us want to put down roots in Troy. Article link in bio, and more essays from rad people in tech at

Check it out! Kelp Pots were featured in HortiDaily. 🥳 We’re so grateful to the incredible team of people who have helped us bring #kelppots to life! Check out the full article at #biodegradable #circulardesign #regenerativefarming #seaweed

Fellow designers, it’s your time! The Core77 Design Awards are here to celebrate the creativity, passion, and purpose that drive your projects. 🌟  This year, our co-founder and principal designer Dierdre Shea will be joining the jury team for Home & Living. With 20 entry categories, this is your chance to showcase the intent, passion, and rigor behind your work—whether it’s client-driven, self-initiated, entrepreneurial, or socially impactful. From commercial to cultural, environmental to discursive, The Core77 Design Awards honor excellence across all areas of design. This is a unique opportunity to share your story and be recognized by our global design community. Looking forward to seeing this year’s submissions! Enter today at designawards.core77.com - - - - - #Core77DesignAwards #DesignExcellence #DesignAwards #Innovation #DesignCommunity #Jury

Molded Seaweed Paper Pulp is is exactly what it sounds like - a fiber material that can be made into shapes using molds, water, and vacuum. This material is waste kelp matter that is formed into packaging and other semi-structural applications. During the seaweed biorefinery process, kelp is processed to extract useful polysaccharides, gels, lipids, and pigments for ingredients in skincare, food supplements, and biodegradable plastics leaving behind leaf and stem matter that we can then combine with recycled paper fibers to create molded paper. We were approached to develop this material by Macro Oceans @macro_oceans , a US-based seaweed ingredient producer looking for a way to incorporate their kelp waste stream into commercial packaging. Using a novel rapid prototyping technique of FDM 3D printed lattice molds developed in our studio, we were able to create structural and precise molded objects. The result is a beautiful speckled paper pulp object that showcases farmed American kelp and offers a speculation on a future where seaweed becomes integrated into the most common and mundane objects. This project was born out of a desire to support the burgeoning American seaweed industry, which has the potential to rapidly fix carbon and support flourishing marine ecosystems, while providing healthy economic and agricultural systems to coastal communities. Finding meaningful applications in our collective quest for healthier material systems is a core tenant of our studio. We are honored and grateful to have this material in building block form currently accessible to touch and see in two distinct public exhibitions — @materialacts exhibition’s Material Library, on view at the @craftcontemporary in Los Angeles until January 5, and as part of the Materials Collection @centerforcraft in Asheville, NC, a permanent installation of over 100 common and innovative craft materials, generously contributed by many artists, companies, and nonprofits nationwide and internationally. Client: Macro Oceans @macro_oceans Material: Molded Seaweed Paper Pulp FSD Team: Julian Goldman Dierdre Shea Aaron Nesser Kairu Tong

Our latest project has been such a delight. We’ve had so much fun designing a materials library furniture system for @centerforcraft ‘s new publicly accessible permanent exhibit The Materials Collection with collaborators @craftwork , curators Mellanee Goodman @mellgoodmanirl and Marilyn Zapf @marilynzapf , Museum Education Specialist Hannah Amuka, and a long list of amazing fabricators including West End Iron Works, Ganster & Co. Woodworks, @marbleplastics , and our incredible FSD intern Kairu Tong @by.kairu . The Materials Collection is a publicly accessible materials library located in Asheville, NC at the Center for Craft, “providing artists with access to new materials and innovative approaches to working with materials.” Designed to highlight the 6 genres of common craft materials, the furniture is made from Wood, Metal, Fiber, Ceramic, Glass, and the modern add Plastic. The furniture system is modular, meant to flex, move, and reorganize with the museum’s growing collection of craft and artist materials. The materials used were chosen for their more sustainable properties, focusing on less waste, recycled inputs, and vintage and reused elements. Accompanying the physical library collection, where you can touch and feel objects, there is an interactive component from our collaborators at Craftwork that highlights in depth information about materials as you explore and correlates with each box from the cabinetry. We were also thrilled to co-curate the Novel Sustainable Materials section, highlighting many of our favorite material brands — more photos to come! 📸Emmanuel Figaro @efigaro