Our conversation with Tania Flores opens a deeply personal perspective on designing urns – shaped by cultural differences, emotional intuition, and the desire for more closeness in farewell. The designer from Nicaragua fundamentally questions classic urn forms: for her, many traditional objects seem distant, cold, and hierarchical – relics of an understanding of death that leaves little room for intimacy.

With her "River Stones" collection, she deliberately presents a counter-design. Instead of focusing on upright, representative forms, she draws inspiration from organic, tangible objects that convey closeness and warmth. Her design process follows less a clear visual concept than an emotional compass: material, idea, and feeling emerge simultaneously, but emotion dictates the direction.

Flores describes designing urns as a particularly responsible task. Unlike other design objects, empathy is at the core here – every detail can influence the grieving process. She handles materiality and sustainability with corresponding sensitivity, as they are inextricably linked with quality and ethos for her, even if they repeatedly require compromises.

Her working method is strongly tactile: she designs through touch, through approximation and repetition. She does not understand perfection as an endpoint but as an ongoing process. Feedback from bereaved relatives – often simple words of thanks – gives her work a special depth and confirms its impact.

Her personal engagement with death also directly flows into her design. She describes death as a societal taboo that she wants to approach with openness – not least because her own experiences of loss have shown her how important unspoken words and lived closeness are. Her work thus became a way to understand and shape grief more consciously.

Tania deliberately leaves open what she wants to achieve with her urns. But at its core, it's about the feeling of warmth, respect, and connection. Her objects are not meant to dictate fixed meanings but to create space – for individual memories and personal forms of remembrance.

With new collections and complementary objects, Tania Flores is working to continue this approach: to understand farewell not as a distant moment, but as part of a living, everyday remembrance.