"Glass is a great teacher" says Maria Renée Morales Lam, who has been working with the material since 2013. "It demands patience, precision, and an almost humbling perseverance. Working with glass often means facing the unpredictable and dealing with failure."
This relationship between control and unpredictability runs through each designer's practice like a fault line - productive rather than problematic. For Mayra Deberg, who came to glass from a background in industrial and product design, the material fundamentally shifted her understanding of what design could be. "Coming from a background shaped by production logic and less by material exploration, working with glass opened up a much more fluid space between design and art," she explains. "It made me realise that design can also be a place for experimentation, sensitivity and expression, where the designer can take on a more authorial, almost artistic position."
What drew her initially was "above all, its fluidity and the way it shapes the creative process. Glass creates a very direct relationship with gesture and the body." While interlacing wire mesh for her piece Caged Chaos (structures that would later receive blown glass) she found herself "reflecting continuously on material, on process and on how far design can go when it is not constrained by rigid productive frameworks."
For Catarina Pacheco, the attraction is rooted in glass's fundamental properties and endless discovery. "Since I can remember, I have been fascinated by glass for its transparency, its colour possibilities, and the beauty of its transformation through the mouth-blown glass technique" she says. After participating in a hands-on workshop with Portuguese glassblowers in 2021, she began exploring colour in glass and developing her own collections. "The more I discover about this material, the more I understand its vast possibilities: through the concepts related to colour and light that I wish to explore and develop; the manufacturing contexts I have visited and the skilled people I have met and collaborated with."
Vitor Agostinho describes this territory with equal clarity: "What continues to fascinate me is the transformative nature of its processes, situated between technical control and creative unpredictability - a fertile ground for experimentation, learning, and the creation of knowledge."
This acceptance of the material's agency and its capacity to surprise, resist, and teach - marks a departure from industrial design's emphasis on replicability and control. "What interests me most is how the material behaves throughout the process, how it reacts to decisions and to the limits of making, rather than the final form itself," Mayra notes. It's an approach that privileges inquiry over certainty, process over product.
For Martinho Pita, whose light sculptures have evolved over 14 years of practice, glass as a material came to being for him as the ultimate solution to combine two elements - light and water. This concept brought ‘GOTAS’ to life - experimental hand-blown glass lamps that resemble water drops. In the beginning of his journey with glass, working in the brutal hours between 3am and 5am (the only window a master glassblower could offer him between factory shifts), he discovered that "two hours for glass blowing feels like two minutes, so decision making became a necessity. In a process where incandescent liquid cools and solidifies rapidly upon contact with air, he learned "to lose control, embrace the beauty of the mistakes and trust improvisation, to be more sharp, raw and real."
This surrender to the material's tempo extends beyond the making. "There is something intriguing about glass," Martinho reflects. "The brutality of its making contrasts with the enormous fragility of the object itself. You feel it just by looking at it. What if I break it?" Throughout the years, pieces have shattered during production, in finishing stages, even just before returning to the studio. "Each time it is a huge personal exercise of letting go. And that really captivates me to keep doing it."
