Ingegerd Råman: Designing for Silence

An overlooked part of the room

Ingegerd Råman is best known for more than five decades of glass and ceramics – the Pulse series for Orrefors, tableware and vessels where simplicity, function and beauty carry equal weight. Less well known is a body of work she has built in recent years around something you cannot see: sound. Råman has long been interested in the acoustics of public spaces, where she believes the sound environment is too often neglected. Her own phrase for it is short: silence must be protected.

Since 2023 that conviction has taken form in wall panels, a pendant lamp and an all-Swedish wool textile – each one starting, as her glass and ceramics always have, with the material itself. For the full story of her career, see our profile of Ingegerd Råman.

All Design News By Okko | ScandinavianDesign.com

Sound Of Silence: peat that swallows sound

The first piece was Sound Of Silence, an acoustic wall panel for Okko Design that premiered during Stockholm Design Week in February 2023. The material is peat fiber, harvested directly from nature and highly sound-absorbing. Its rough, strong character was what caught Råman’s curiosity.

The name comes from a simple acoustic fact: cavities swallow sound. Råman joined peat-fiber absorbers and cut cavities through them in two layers. The pattern combines two hole sizes – the smaller ones repeated in a strict grid, the larger ones drawn entirely by hand – which gives both the best possible absorption and a soft, lively surface. The modules measure 100 × 109 × 6 cm, come in any NCS colour, and work alone or assembled across walls and ceilings. The panel is rated sound absorption class A and fire class B.

Later that year the panel was part of Acoustic Art by Nature at Form/Design Center in Malmö, where Okko showed wall panels, room dividers and pendants in hemp, peat and paper yarn by Råman alongside Carina Seth Andersson, Monica Förster and others.

Ingegerd-raman-silent-light-okko-design-2 | ScandinavianDesign.com

Silent Light: a lamp that absorbs

Silent Light takes the idea from the wall to the ceiling. The pendant is made from hemp, a light, strong material with natural sound-absorbing properties, so the lamp improves the room’s acoustics while it lights it. It measures 70 cm in diameter and comes in natural hemp or black, with a cord in hemp or textile and details in aluminium and nickel. The name describes both jobs at once.

Swedish wool, from sheep to panel

The third strand is textile. Together with Verk, Råman spent more than three years developing an all-Swedish furniture textile – something that had not been produced for decades. The project was led by textile engineer Rebecca Josefsson from the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås and involved Swedish spinners, dyers and weavers. Råman shaped the textile’s aesthetic. The four launch varieties each take their colour from the wool quality of the sheep.

The fabric soon found an acoustic use. Abstracta now covers its sound absorbers in Råman’s textile, sold as Reinventing Textile: Swedish wool, produced in Sweden at every step, whose natural properties support the panel’s absorption. Verk has also paired her V.IR.02 and V.IR.04 cushion designs with Mia Cullin’s pine sofa in an all-Swedish wool collection.

Abstracta acoustic panel featuring Ingegerd Råman's innovative Swedish textile application that enhances both function and aesthetics

The same method, a new medium

Seen together, the acoustic pieces follow the logic of Råman’s glass and ceramics. She starts with a material’s own character – peat, hemp, wool – and removes what is unnecessary until the function and the form are the same thing. The result is quieter rooms, made with the same restraint that made her glass famous.

By Editorial Team, ScandinavianDesign.com