A Chair with Pedersen+Lennard

This is a collaboration I did recently with industrial designers Luke Pedersen and James Lennard (of Pedersen+Lennard: www.pedersenlennard.co.za).

They were giving a talk at Toffie design festival in Cape Town (toffiepop.blogspot.com), and asked me to make a design for them to laser etch into the wood of a chair of theirs that was partially the subject of the talk.

The talk was centred around the issues with green companies. They are said to be a green company, but realise that the practicalities surrounding the term are not as simple and clearcut as it the label suggests.

Pedersen+Lennard is a furniture company specialising in flat-pack furniture, a style of furniture design that saves significant amounts in transport costs. They have also recently started importing Finnish birch to make their chairs, replacing the local but vastly inferior South African pine. This means the raw materials must travel thousands of kilometres to get to the place manufacture. On the positive side, the birch lasts far longer than our local pine, meaning fewer chairs need be made, and therefore fewer trees felled and transported; and birch grows is far more abundantly in Finland than the native hard wood trees do here, which are in short supply and struggling.

So we decided to embrace this confusion and lack of clarity, and the misleading nature of absolute terms, and to present a brown chair at the festival (not a green one).