Clara Kernreuter

Clara Kernreuter is a craft and product designer based in France. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris and studied social and political sciences at Sciences Po. She believes that the transition towards more sustainable production and construction systems must be led by design, while being deeply connected to political, socio-economic, and cultural systems. 

After working in design studios and as an independent designer, she joined Atelier LUMA, the research and design program of LUMA Arles, as a designer and project leader. Her work develops on two levels: she has built an expertise in mineral materials such as ceramics, raw earth, and stone, with a particular focus on adapting architectural ceramic production to the diversity of “alternative” material sources, those not extracted through conventional quarrying. 

At the same time, she contributes to the development of bioregional mapping methodologies that aim to represent local dynamics, resources, and actor networks, in order to support projects rooted in their specific context and attentive to social, ecological, and cultural dimensions. In this framework, she is also developing an open-source digital documentation tool to support the designer-researcher community by sharing knowledge and methodologies around bioregional design practices. 

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Take a look at a selection of Kernreuter’s work below.