Special exhibition Lightweight

Lightweight design is currently the technological megatrend in the industrial design of furniture and interior fittings, for movable items and real estate alike. The development efforts made in recent years in the supplier industry, in the wood-engineering field and the cooperating research institutions have led to innovative design and production solutions that are making tomorrow's cabinetry-design 2.0 possible: down with weight, up with product performance! – What may seem paradoxical at first glance is, upon closer inspection, nothing more and nothing less than a linkage between the wood and furniture industry, and the general technological progression towards miniaturization, resolute reductions of the materials used and, in developments ahead, certainly an increase in the integration of technology in modern furnishing products. What makes this transformative process so exciting today is the major dynamic of change, coupled with a determination to create closer collaboration among all parties concerned along the value chain.

The current situation in classic massive furniture construction is characterized by a high level of quality and continuing increases in energy prices – where even short-term relaxation in prices cannot conceal a basic upward trend. Due to increased use of wood as an alternative fuel, and the linkage that this creates between the availability and prices of pre-products for particle boards and fiberboards and the energy market, is is foreseeable that the costs confronting massive furniture production will get out of hand. In some subareas, classic wood panel materials such as light plywood made of tropical woods are purely and simply no longer available in the quantities required. As furniture products see themselves confronted with cost pressures due to cheap imports, increasing potentials for reducing logistics costs also play an important role, not to mention the legal restrictions such as permissible contract weights and weight-based customs duties at some national borders outside of the EU. We can sum up the situation with the old Native American saying: "If your horse is dead, dismount."

On the other hand, already today there is an effort underway in international markets that favors lightweight furniture designs that enlist current fashion trends to create powerful material looks for the lower market segments, and to come up with extremely lean looks or a let one's imagination run free in a daring play with the dimensions of materials in the higher-end market segments. Ecological aspects are also already helping determine success in some markets. Consequently, "eco-profit" is already possible today, provided that the product's ecological balance sheet is right, and when the products can make a positive contribution to reducing CO2 emissions. Breakneck growth in the mobility of a society calls for intelligent, easily managed and variable products that can be used without disappointment, combine individual demands, naturally accomplishing all of this without causing backaches. – The assumption that "heavy merchandise equals a good merchandise" is rapidly losing weight with the change of generations! Lightweight functional sportwear, lightweight high-tech bicycle frames, and the extremely lean notebook computer are the status symbols of the product pioneers who in their everyday office lives have learned to tailor their furnishings to the communication situation at hand with a few flicks of the wrist.

Over the long term, modern lightweight furniture design opens up entirely new diversification potentials for design technology, creating the basis for technologically innovative and concisely designed furnishings. This applies equally to the industrially produced furniture and to individual solutions in interior fittings. After all, who says that ceiling-high sliding doors fitted with mirrors have to weigh 80 kg, or that the 800 mm wide shelf of a bookcase necessarily has to buckle like a fruit bowl beneath the weight of the books it holds, or that younger people necessarily need to have a truck driver's license just to get around in their recreational vehicle? The trend today is towards replacing old paradigms with a new approach that is open to the future, and to replace old, monolithic materials and the processing technologies they involved with high-tech materials and modern production and assembly procedures. Companies in the wood and furniture industry, as specialists for the most important renewable raw material, face a future that offers countless opportunities for developing new sub-markets. And, as life teaches us, losing weight is just the first step.

The multimedia exhibition on lightweight furniture design seeks to forge links between specialists in wood and furniture technology, on the one hand, and planners, designers and makers of furniture on the other. The focus, accordingly, is not on specific raw materials, design components or processes, but rather on the furniture itself. Brave furniture produced by furniture makers with recent experience in the production and marketing of lightweight products, and just as brave - and at times perhaps even bold - designs by students who, free from everyday pressures, have quite consciously gone a bit beyond the goals we are in a position to imagine today. The effect of the items on display are supported by film segments devoted to the topic of "lightweight" that were shot with the goal in mind of intentionally expanding what up until now has largely been a technological approach to lightweight design, adding an emotional element. The exhibition was created through the co-operation of the University of Applied Sciences of Lippe and Höxter and the Lightweight Construction Association – which, for its part, as an Association of companies in the furniture, delivery and wood-engineering industry, including trade groups, universities and research institutes, is devoted to joint activities to develop and advance the idea of lightweight construction in the wood and furniture areas.

Prof. Martin Stosch, Engineer

Laboratory for furniture construction of the wood technology program in the Production and Economics department of the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences - www.hs-owl.de - www.igel-ev.net
martin.stosch@hs-owl.de - Tel.: +49.5261.702.182