Stykka is a Danish designer and manufacturer focusing on delivering circular furniture for homes and buildings. We spoke with Davide Costa (Software Developer at Stykka) and Ira Kapaj (Computational Designer at Stykka) about how Speckle played a key role in enabling their mission to reduce waste in the built environment.

Introducing Stykka

Stykka is a Danish manufacturer, designing and manufacturing circular furniture for homes and buildings. With a focus on innovation, technology, and circularity, Stykka aims to rethink the role of furniture by drastically reducing waste in the built environment.

Stykka’s technological stack plays a huge role in underpinning these values by automating relevant tasks, improving efficiency through analytics and optimisation, and through the novel application of simple, proven technologies from other industries.

Speckle played an important role in enabling collaboration across different disciplines within the Stykka teams, allowing for faster team coordination and acting as a central database for their 3D models. This case study focuses on how Stykka reinforced circular modeling with Speckle.

The Need for a Reliable Geometry Library

Designing and manufacturing circular furniture requires strong coordination between different designers using various tools and software. To work on projects effectively, Stykka is continuously seeking fast cooperation and smooth communication with external stakeholders and clients for reviews and iterations.

Before adopting Speckle, Stykka faced the challenge of geometry duplication, meaning team members could not trust the project files they were working with due to a lack of information alignment across models. Such issues included:

• Duplicated work used by various designers leads to huge time wastes
• Risk of overriding each other’s work due to no real-time synchronisation
• Lack of streamlined workflows meaning higher geometry maintenance
  

The team was looking for a more efficient model placeholder for design projects.

Stykka’s technological stack underpins these values by automating relevant tasks, improving efficiency through analytics and optimization, and through the novel application of simple, proven technologies from other industries, like Speckle.

Saving Time and Effort: From Google Drive to Speckle

To solve the geometry duplication issue at Stykka, the team adopted Speckle as their central geometry database, using it as an internal library. Designers were then able to use Speckle to version control models and browse the libraries when quoting.

“It was a game changer to know where every model and every part is” (Ira Kapja, Computational Designer at Stykka)

“We have developed our in-house Grasshopper Plug-in to interact with these libraries.”

New versions of models were added to their library, leading to services developed internally for pricing, warehouse management, manufacturing and life cycle assessments.

You can see Stykka in action:

Once the final design is ready, the team leverages Speckle’s commenting and presentation capabilities to showcase geometry data in their project management tool, alongside results from their services. This allows for smooth client presentations and updates.

The ability to go back and forth between older revisions of models empowered the team to keep an up-to-date view of various parts (i.e. always being able to track and replace broken or damaged parts was valuable).

Next Steps with Stykka and Speckle

Moving forward, Stykka aims to expand their Speckle integration to enable end users to interact with the model, order replacements and refurbished parts. Stykka is also looking to create a Web Interface to simplify their quoting process, allowing customers to create their designs and calculate estimates of price and environmental impact data by launching their “Configurator.”

Finally, Stykka aims to improve its warehousing system by facilitating packaging and delivery and generating a bill of materials (BOM) directly from the models.

We’re looking forward to seeing what the Stykka team achieves next!

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