IDS Report: Furniture from a Four Foot Square
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 02.24.07
The Ryerson School of Interior Design "is making its move towards sustainability- designing intelligently for today without compromising the environment of tomorrow, whether by degradation of resources or through poor design requiring constant updates.
Students were challenged to design and manufacture a table prototype aimed for mass production using only a 4' by 4' sheet of Baltic birch plywood. Work shown here is representative and chosen only because my photography is so lousy that these are the only shots that turned out. Shirley Chueng's table above reminds my of a telephone table of another era. (and is also my sharpest picture.)
The program, laser cut into a 4x4 sheet: this is what they had to work with.
Maia Koffey squeezed this lovely traditional table out of a sheet;
How the Russian Constructivists might have designed a laptop computer table. Bradley Marks did a great job.
Kirstine Rankine's table
Angelique Lucas-Witte
There were others that should be included, for they all showed remarkable ingenuity in squeezing more out of sixteen square feet of plywood than I would have thought possible. I will update as better pictures become available. ::Ryerson School of Interior Design from the ::Interior Design Show
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I'm studying sustainable design in the UK and we were set a a similar task to create flat pack furniture out of a 8'x4' sheet of flat material. It is much more challanging than you would think, so I am very impressed by the results shown here.
I have been searching for plans on flat pack furniture, do you know, or know someone who has great looking funiture plans such as the ideas shown above?
Jason
jasongoss@cox.net