ABOUT
Designing for Continuity
Bricolage HSZ is a founder-led practice working on textile systems, material behaviour, and long-term product responsibility. It is led by textile and fashion designer Henrietta Szakonyi, who has worked independently in this field since 2017.
The practice sits at the intersection of design, production reality, and regulatory change, and asks one question: how can textile products and systems remain viable over time — materially, economically, and structurally?
We can't solve planetary boundaries in product development. Seven of nine have already been crossed. One garment changes little.
But every product decision pays into one direction or the other. And none of these decisions stands alone.
What stays with me is a thought from climate research: tipping points rarely shift because of one single trigger. It takes many small changes acting together until a threshold is crossed.
A material changes what construction allows in the first place. At the same time, material, construction, regulation, business model, and later use all influence each other. None of these decisions decides alone. At some point their combination shifts a threshold — and some future paths close that no one consciously closed.
That's why we don't work with checklists, but with decision networks. They make visible where decisions reinforce each other, where conflicts emerge, and when a combination crosses a threshold.
None of these futures — repair, resale, or circularity — begins at the end of a lifecycle. They start much earlier, in how we develop. Compliance and economics don't pull against ecology here. Done right, they point in the same direction.
What interests me isn't only which future a product could have. It's when we begin to unknowingly rule out other possible futures.
HOW THE PRACTICE WORKS
Bricolage HSZ operates across three connected areas:
Advisory — founder-led work with organisations at the point where early material and product decisions shape long-term outcomes.
Studio — applied validation of remade feasibility and controlled pilots under real production conditions.
Co-Lab — collaborative research and development exploring how shared infrastructure for long-life textile systems and industrial remade could operate.
Not every project moves across all three areas, but all work follows the same design logic.
Team & collaboration
Bricolage HSZ is a founder-led practice, but the work is not carried out alone.
Depending on the project, I collaborate with a small group of long-term partners across production, infrastructure, and system development. This includes expertise in:
software and systems engineering
textile machinery and production engineering
supply chain and operational processes
material development and testing
social enterprise and funding structures
These collaborations make it possible to translate design-led thinking into workable, certifiable, and adaptable systems — particularly in the context of remade production and shared infrastructure.
The structure remains intentionally modular and grows with the systems being developed.
Teaching & knowledge exchange
Alongside applied work, the practice stays connected to teaching and knowledge exchange. This includes ongoing adult-education workshops on repair, longevity, and material behaviour, building on earlier university teaching. Teaching functions as an extension of the practice — translating material and system knowledge into shared understanding.