People / Maja Rowecka
Maja Rowecka (b. 2001) is a Polish designer and painter based between Warsaw and London. She graduated from the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and is currently pursuing an MA in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins. Her practice is rooted in ecological awareness, material sensitivity, and socially engaged thinking. She is interested in objects and systems that encourage care, reflection, and more responsible ways of living. Alongside design, painting remains an important part of her creative practice.
Cardboard Chess
Looking at my design practice, I feel I have more models waiting to take their final shape than ideas queueing to become prototypes. Without workshop access, turning an idea into a final object can spiral into a logistical nightmare, where every search for an outsourced process seems to end with minimum orders, single-item refusals, or another ‘maybe you know someone?’
Since moving to London, cardboard has become a constant presence in my life: packing boxes, delivery envelopes, temporary furniture, project storage and, when money and tools were limited, an accessible prototyping material. Soon, I found myself enjoying it as a final material too, giving me agency to make with minimal infrastructure. The chess set is lightweight, flat-packed and made from card. It arrives by post, assembles quickly, uses its envelope as a board and stores flat. Limitations become generative – the form stems from learning how to make outside of a workshop.