EcoDesign collection of ecological chairs

EcoDesign at Habitare 09, photo: Seppo Laakso

Design Forum Finland exhibits 45 chairs designed on ecological criteria by Finnish designers, on view through January 10th, 2010.

 
Finland’s largest furniture, interior decoration and design fair Habitare selected ecological design as the theme for its special exhibition at the 2009 fair, held in Helsinki in early September. One of the leading Finnish designers and the pioneer of ecological furniture design, Yrjö Kukkapuro, curated the exhibition, which was titled EcoDesign.
 
Kukkapuro invited top-class international designers and young talent to participate, and 81 designers or designer groups from 16 countries accepted the challenge. Their task was to design an ecological chair – or a product serving the function of a chair – and rate their design on six different eco-criteria, including materials selection; production process; packaging and transportation; uses, durability and maintenance; and recyclability.
 
The exhibition was the first international event of ecological furniture design in the northern countries.
 
Kukkapuro has selected 45 of the Finnish designers from the original EcoDesign Special Exhibition for a new edition of the exhibition at Design Forum Finland. They represent innovative thinking of furniture and ecology. Almost all chairs are prototypes, but some of the designers have proceeded with furniture makers on plans for industrial-scale manufacturing.
 
Kukkapuro commented on the difficulty of the theme in connection of the original show, “We are deeply adapted to industrial processes and transporting materials over long distances.” However, he envisions, “Ecological viewpoint has become a permanent part of the basics of functional design.”
 

His own design for the exhibition is titled “Koivutuoli”. This is a lightweight armchair suitable for a variety of uses and environments. The raw material is birch, a local and readily available material. Together with Fang Hai of China, he has designed “Small Bamboo Chair”, made for a Unesco development project on using bamboo in new, innovative ways. Bamboo furniture designed by Kukkapuro for the Chinese domestic market was one of the catalysts for the original idea of EcoDesign.

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EgoDesign1, photo courtesy of Advertising Agency Valo Oy