A Day with David Stovell, Designer

20 June 2008

Invited by David Stovell, product designer, I spent the morning walking through an old coppice wood in Essex County, UK. Coppicing is a sustainable way to grow and harvest trees. You cut a tree at its base and it regrows in multiple shoots. This isn’t as useful for large scale harvesting, as the shoots don’t get too think. That being said, it works great for furniture production, and other small scale wood products.

Much of David Stovell’s work includes recycled goods, such as his newspaper chair. Also, the night before, I went to an Eco-Design and Fashion show, and much of what was going on there included recycled fabrics and other goods. This brought to me the question: can you make these goods from recycled stock with any sort of speed or mass production? Could a system be developed that brings together systems so that this could happen?

He feels design has a big role to play in spreading eco-consciousness: consumption is powerful, and as people consume more and more sustainable goods, they get the ideas in their head. In this way, it’s important to think about what makes a product sell: Is it actual good design? Or is it just because of its eco-friendliness? Does it matter who makes it? If it’s industrialized or not? The influence of design in a consumer world (at least product design) depends on whether or not the product is bought. If no-one wants what your making, even if it’s the most eco-friendly product out there, it won’t make much of a difference in the world.

In an attempt to compete with a market flooded by cheaply made, mass produced furniture, David is showing his buyer with the very thing the mass producer is keeping hidden: the details of the production process. He’s attaching the history of the wood that created his piece, the people who worked on each piece, the methods used to shape the wood, everything down to how far the wood has traveled. He hopes this will establish emotional connections between the user and the furniture. He feels the production process is important and people should know and understand the environmental implications of the furniture their buying.

He’s also doing explorations of ideas, which even if not feasible, are important, as they discuss new viewpoints and point out current problems (see his Flipper project).

He also feels that in bigger productions, the designer loses power in how the product gets made.

A large part of the day was spent discussing materials. Is it better to used recycled materials? Are they sustainable? If our design gets better, won’t scraps eventually be diminished? When you’re working with wood, there’s different was to sustainably forest: selective harvesting, coppicing. Also, he discussed both the benefits of having regulations (like FSC approval). It’s good to have some established point of comparison, but it takes significant sums of money to get certified. This means that while the guy from which he buys his wood couldn’t harvest in a more sustainable manner, but can’t technically claim his wood is sustainably harvested.

Check out David Stovell’s website here.