This year, I fortunately worked on a submission to RSA's Student Design Awards alongside 4th year Product Design student Lewis Jarvie. The brief required a solution that utilised woodland resources to stimulate inclusive and sustainable economic activity.
Our solution is nuif - a social enterprise that encourages play, collection and connection through 14 hand crafted sets of wooden blocks, collected along the NC500, with aims to strengthen local communities through a non-linear, systems thinking approach.
Scottish for neat and tidy, ‘nuif’ encapsulates the Scottish roots that the proposal is founded on. Each year in the UK alone, approximately 5 tonnes of plastic is consumed (House of Commons Library, 2020).
Combined with a declining economy and displacement of traditional trades, integrating the natural woodland with sustainable manufacturing back into our lives, communities, and employment opportunities is essential to building a brighter future.
For the purpose of not having access to high quality tools (or a workshop) to construct the wooden shapes, Lewis 3D printed them using wood filament. In order to print, the filament does include plastic however a production quality product would be constructed entirely from timber.
