80 Years – 8 Seconds – 180 Grams

Profile

Robyn Sonntag is a Swiss-based designer working across spatial design, product design and design research. Through hands-on material experimentation, conceptual research and visual storytelling, she explores the intersections of design, environment and industry, and the relationships between people, the spaces they inhabit and the systems that shape them.

She works between digital and analogue methods, from sketching and form studies to modelling, prototyping and full-scale execution. Her work is functional, yet it aims to invite people to think differently about how we coexist with our surroundings.

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Design
Design Academy Eindhoven (NL) Cum Laude

Exhibitions

Graduation Show 2026
@Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven, NL)
“Soft Transit”

Blind Spot
@Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven, NL)
“80 Years – 8 Seconds – 180 Grams”, with Paula Schulte

Covilhã Design Triennial
(Covilhã, PT)
“Fountain Scapes”

Glass Room
@Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven, NL)
“Felt Dirty”

We were here
@Salone del Mobile (Milan, IT)
“Curtain of Host and Commensal”, with Bureautobeconfirmed

Fields of Industries
@Z33 (Hasselt, BE)
“Rhine‘s transformation‘”, with Studio Technogeographies

Email, Instagram

BA Graduation Project @Design Academy Eindhoven, Exhibithed during The Blind Spot at Dutch Design Week 2026.

In Collaboration with Paula Schulte with a special thanks to the Lübecker Stadtwald.

80 years – 8 seconds – 180 grams is a research project that follows the journey of a single spruce tree, from seed to ash, with its final material trace transformed into soap. In Northern Europe, fast-growing spruce monocultures are an important economic factor. Often vulnerable to drought, disease and bark beetles, these forests are frequently presented as victims of natural disturbance. A spruce grows from a planted seed into a mature tree within 80 years. Within approximately 8 seconds, it’s cut down. Once felled, the tree is stripped, transported, processed for timber or burned for energy. When burned, the remaining 180 grams of ashes become a material measure of 80 years of growth. Using a historical soap-making process, Robyn Sonntag and Paula Schulte transform the ashes of a single tree into soap. By linking the lifespan of a tree to an everyday act of consumption, they propose another reading of forest decline: one that invites reflection on the timescales of forests, industry and human consumption.

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