Why the future of circular furniture needs more than traceability.
Imagine buying a beautifully crafted piece of furniture made from reclaimed materials. You know who designed it, where the materials came from and why certain choices were made. Perhaps you even know something about its previous life.
Now imagine that same piece twenty years later.
It has moved between homes, been repaired, perhaps adapted to a different purpose. Its original maker may have retired. The website where its story was documented may no longer exist. And the person who now owns it might know very little about where it came from.
The furniture is still there. But much of what made it valuable beyond its physical materials may have disappeared.
This is something I've been thinking about through May Again. If we want furniture to remain in circulation for decades, shouldn't we also think about how its identity, history and accumulated knowledge survive?
The problem with a passport that depends on its issuer
A recent research paper, Whose Passport Is It Anyway?*, by Matthias Babel and colleagues (2026), explores a fundamental weakness in current approaches to Digital Product Passports (DPPs).
Many digital product information systems still depend on the organisation that originally created them. But products can outlive their manufacturers, change owners and enter entirely new value chains.
The researchers propose a decentralised architecture that separates the authenticity of product information from the management and transfer of its digital passport.
In simple terms, the information about a product can remain verifiable even when its original issuer is no longer involved. The person holding the product can manage and transfer the associated digital records without repeatedly depending on the manufacturer.
The paper also explores how individual components can retain their own passports when they are removed, reused or incorporated into something new.
It's an important technical contribution, particularly for products designed to have long and potentially complicated lives.
But reading it raised another question for me.
What happens after we've made sure the information can survive?
A product doesn't stop evolving when it leaves the workshop
In architecture and interior projects, we're accustomed to documenting what goes into a building or an interior. We record materials, manufacturers, technical properties and maintenance requirements.
What we rarely document is what happens afterwards.
A table might spend ten years in a restaurant before finding its way into a workplace. A chair might be repaired, reupholstered or adapted to a different setting. A piece originally made from reclaimed timber might eventually be dismantled, with its materials becoming part of something else.
Each transition generates information that could be useful to someone in the future.
Not all of it is technical. Some of it concerns the decisions people make, the way objects are used, the care they receive and the meaning they acquire.
We tend to treat this information as incidental. Yet it may influence whether an object is maintained, repaired, passed on or discarded.
I wonder whether we're overlooking an important part of circular design by focusing so heavily on the moment of production.
From product information to living object identity
At May Again, we're exploring this question through an early-stage object identity pilot.
Together with independent circular designers, we're experimenting with digital identities that allow furniture to collect new chapters throughout its life.
Our first active object was created by Belgian designer Tom De Koninck of Rover. Tom has contributed an initial chapter, and additional objects are being prepared for the pilot.
We're still at the beginning, and we haven't yet established whether owners and users will actively contribute over time. That's precisely one of the things we want to discover.
What interests me is the possibility of connecting different kinds of information around the same object.
Its original materials and design decisions. Its repairs and alterations. Its changing locations and uses. And, where people choose to share them, the personal experiences that become part of its history.
These contributions aren't all equivalent. A verified repair record is different from someone's personal memory of a piece. Both may be meaningful, but they need to remain distinguishable.
The research by Babel and colleagues provides an interesting technical perspective on trustworthy, transferable product information. Our experiment explores a related but different question: whether a continuing object identity can help people recognise and preserve value beyond the initial sale.
Could continuity become a design responsibility?
Here's where I think the conversation becomes particularly interesting.
If we accept that furniture should move between contexts rather than automatically being replaced, who takes responsibility for making those transitions possible?
The designer knows how the object was made. The owner knows how it has been used. A repairer knows what has been changed. An architect or interior designer may recognise where it could fit next.
Each holds a different piece of knowledge.
But no single person necessarily remains involved throughout the object's entire life.
A digital identity might help connect that knowledge, provided the information remains accessible and the people involved have a reason to maintain it.
Still, information alone won't move a piece of furniture into its next setting.
Someone needs to recognise its potential, assess its condition, make decisions about repair or adaptation, and establish whether it is suitable for a new context.
A passport may help an object remain identifiable. It doesn't automatically help that object remain in use.
That distinction matters.
The opportunity isn't simply to create better digital records, but to develop practical systems that connect those records to decisions about continued use.
The challenge of making continuity work
There's an important warning in the paper itself.
Giving people control over their product information also gives them responsibilities. They may need to manage digital wallets, preserve access credentials and decide what information to share. What looks like empowerment in a technical model can become an unwanted burden in everyday life.
The authors acknowledge that these questions require further real-world research.
For me, that reinforces an essential principle: any system intended to support circularity must be easier to participate in than to ignore.
Nobody should need to understand blockchain technology to care for a chair or pass it on to someone else.
And designers shouldn't need to become technology providers, logistics operators and data managers simply because they want their work to remain in circulation.
This is also where the economic questions begin.
Who benefits from maintaining an object's identity? Who would be willing to pay for that continuity? And at what point does the information become valuable enough to influence a real decision?
We don't have those answers yet.
But they seem worth investigating.
Designing for what happens after the first sale
Circular design has made important progress in questioning what products are made from and how they are made.
I believe we need to pay just as much attention to what happens after they enter the world.
A product's first life is only one part of its potential. Its next life depends on more than material durability. It also depends on whether people can understand it, care for it, adapt it and recognise its value in a different context.
The technology being explored in Whose Passport Is It Anyway? offers one possible foundation for keeping product information accessible and transferable.
What interests me at May Again is what we could build around that foundation.
Not another database of objects waiting to be discovered, but a way of helping objects remain meaningful, useful and valuable as circumstances change.
Because the real challenge isn't just designing furniture that can last.
It's designing the conditions that make keeping it worthwhile.
*Research reference
Babel, M., Guthmann, C., Körner, M.-F., Kranz, T., & Strüker, J. (2026). Whose passport is it anyway? A decentralized web3-inspired architecture for sovereign digital product passports in the circular economy. Electronic Markets, 36, Article 84.
The research cited above develops and evaluates a technical architecture for decentralised digital product passports. The reflections on furniture, living object identities, continued use and May Again's pilot are my own interpretation and ongoing exploration, not findings established by the paper.
Image credits: Tom De Koninck showing his Scrap chair, which entered the Living Object Identity Pilot by May Again
