by John Burrows | One of my favourite items from IDSwest was Henry Sun’s Amber project. It charted the transformation of a sick 200 year old Douglas Fir tree from Stanley Park into a table and chair, all beautifully laid out in a book by Max Olson. It’s reassuring to see that wood is increasingly a design material that is being used to reconnect people to their environments, even if they are urban environments…

Witness above the outstanding 12 x 12 exhibition during NY Design Week back in May: all of the pieces in the show were made from wood salvaged from demolished or dismantled buildings in the Big Apple, the challenge being to allow for the past use of the materials to inform the object or theme. Wood from a distillery could be used to make a bar cart, et cetera…

And then last month there was the Adventures of 12 Hardwood Chairs project at London Design Week. It tasked 12 students from the Royal College of Art with designing chairs made from American hardwoods. Sustainability experts aided in the preparation of life cycle reports for each chair, thereby giving the students the full “cradle-to-grave” environmental impacts of their design and material choices.

All 3 projects bring to the fore the stories of both the materials and the people working with them. In Vancouver, a wander along the beach tells us that each log has it’s own story and reminds us that a spectrum of designers from student Henry Sun to the internationally recognized Brent Comber are bringing them to life.

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John is a web entrepreneur and writer who curates the online shop at Wood Design. He is passionate about materials and is always seeking out the craftsmanship that surrounds us, appreciating it as the antidote to a generation that has lost touch with its industrial roots and the motivation to perform a task well for its own sake.