Sustainable furniture production for an environmentally friendly future

The Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design invited the curious audience to an exciting roundtable discussion again on the 24^th of November. The participants of the discussion placed the emphasis on the relationship between the environment and society and discussed significant sustainability issues in product design and architecture. 

The Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design created the Budapest Design Material Library so that the Hungarian representatives of the creative industry can always be up-to-date regarding the most innovative materials. The material library was based on international examples and renders samples from all around the world available in the form of a database. The increased visibility and recognition of the material library are supported by the professional events held under the event series titled BDML Insider.

The fourth roundtable discussion was held now in the university’s building with the participation of Edit Blaumann, a researcher at MOME Innovation Centre; Fanni Hegedűs, carpenter and restaurateur; László Szikszai, founder and managing director of Sixay Bt; and Gábor Wilheim, president of Fabunio. The participants discussed the Renaissance of natural materials with the moderation of Dávid Pap, managing director of Fablab.

Already at the beginning of the roundtable discussion, it turned out from the participants’ introduction that their connection and approach to wood as a material and working with it differed for all four of them.  In the discussion, it was revealed that each participant has a different view of wood: someone associates it with a forest when they hear this material’s name, others regard it as a factor affecting the climate, while others think of it as raw material, and sometimes, it is seen as waste.

Afterwards, Gábor Wilheim presented Fabunio’s role in the wood industry: the Association of Hungarian Furniture and Woodworking Industries aims to popularise wood industry professions in schools. The success of this goal is shown by the fact that thanks to this, there is an oversubscription in vocational schools in Budapest. They pay special attention to renewing education, they believe in the importance of a project-based approach, training teachers, and familiarising them with modern technologies so they can pass this knowledge and approach on to their pupils first-hand.

The audience could widen their knowledge on the topic of sustainable furniture production as well: even though wood is a renewable resource and sustainable material; processing, working wood, and creating products from it result in the wood not being entirely sustainable. The participants looked for a solution to this, they believe that a sort of change of perspective is needed in furniture manufacturing. They think it would be important to focus on local manufacturing and use local materials for products.

Increasing social consciousness and changing users’ attitudes are indispensable elements of sustainable furniture production. The speakers think that nowadays buzzwords such as biological footprint, environmentally friendly, and green lifestyle are widely used, but these definitions are often confused. Thus, the first step of education is that everyone understands the message of these terms and builds it into their way of thinking. In addition, the participants mentioned that we must not place all responsibility on the end user, but sustainability aspects should be considered already when processing the raw material and manufacturing the products.

To close the roundtable discussion, the participants talked about the forward-looking role of the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency: Gábor Wilheim, Fabunio’s president works as a jury member in some of the Agency’s mentoring programmes; thus, he affirmed that, since designers have the opportunity to take part in educative programmes, it is more and more visible that they consider sustainability aspects as well during designing.