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posted by martyb on Sunday June 28 2015, @07:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the knot-bad! dept.

Additive manufacturing has been touted as a technology that will revolutionize the way we mass-produce and distribute things. Like a growing number of people, designer and artist Gavin Munro of England believe that the way the current process of how trees are grown, harvested, milled, cut, assembled and finished is inefficient and too resource-intensive. But rather than turning to cutting-edge tech to solve this problem, Munro decided to use water, air and soil in a solution that he characterizes as a kind of "organic 3D printing" where objects like chairs, tables and lamps are grown by hand and molded into the desired forms, rather than made by machine.

Munro's project, Full Grown, began when he realized that it would be quicker and more efficient to grow, train and prune trees into the shapes and objects that we need, instead of waiting forty to sixty years for a tree to grow to the right size, then using huge machines and trucks to harvest, transport and make furniture. So eight years ago, Munro planted a viable grove of several hundred trees that he will be finally harvesting later this year as his first batch of lamps and chairs (mainly willow but also sycamore, ash, hazel and crab apple.)

It's an intriguing idea that rethinks the whole process of production, but Munro notes that he's not the first to do it; most notably we've seen artisanal companies like Pooktre and Grown Furniture using the same concept, but Munro's operation seems truly focused on creating a mass-farmed product, which he describes as "mass production meets delayed gratification." In addition, he plans to offer up his techniques on an open-source basis, so that anyone with some basic hand tools, a bit of land and the knowledge will be able to grow their own furniture.

Apparently from: Open source project grows & prunes trees into furniture (Video)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 28 2015, @10:10AM (#202387)

    Grow them so they can use regular trees as furniture... there are millions of trees out there, think how effective this would be!