Contemporary furniture and technology In this article, we look at one particular contemporary furniture designer who has sought to use technology to bring together modern manufacturing techniques and equipment, with small scale local manufacturing.

Designer Olivier Geoffroy’s revolutionary scheme to develop a network of local, digital workshops producing contemporary furniture that competes - in price, looks and quality - with the likes of Habitat and Ikea, is well on course - his range is constantly expanding and his inspired, yet affordable designs are never out of the style press.

Intense, yet personable, with the charming French ‘abit of dropping ‘is aitches - he moved to London from Paris - Geoffroy obsessively devotes all his time and money to realizing what is an ambitious, and, admirably, socially-motivated initiative.

‘Thanks to new technology, I believe mass-production is no longer the only way to make furniture at a reasonable price,’ he relates. ‘What I want to recreate is the atmosphere and the convenience of a local craftsman’s workshop, where each item of furniture can be made on demand to the customer’s specifications.’ Such an approach eliminates stock wastage, reduces transport costs and provides employment in a community.

The name ‘Unto This Last’ pays homage to John Ruskin’s influential nineteenth-century treatise anticipating the limits of the industrial revolution, which inspired a renaissance in traditional craft in the locality, but Geoffroy’s over-riding inspiration is the weighty-sounding tome Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand by Malcolm McCullough, a Professor of architecture at Harvard.

The crux of McCullough’s thesis seems to be that, traditionally, craft has been approached as an art form like painting or sculpture, with the work of art not able to exist until executed by the artist. In the digital age, craft should be viewed more like musical composition, with the design being notated in a digital format. Then, as with music, the work of art would exist as soon as it is written down, to be recreated by anyone with the ability to use a digital tool, anywhere in the world.

The upshot is that Geoffroy painstakingly programmes a vast, computer-controlled, 3D cutting tool to carve intricate components from sheets of sustainable, birch plywood, predominantly, but any other adaptable materials can be used including veneered ply or, more unexpectedly, a phenolic resin sheet material normally used for casting concrete.

Once the ‘tolerances’ are spot on - ‘The aim is to make the machine do as much of the work as possible’ – the components slot precisely together, requiring little more than a dab of glue to complete the assembly process. A dining chair can be put together in a matter of minutes. Geoffroy says five, his fellow digital craftsmen, suggest eight, but either way Geoffroy has proved his premise that an independent craftsman can faultlessly and profitably fabricate a designer chair to order at high street prices.

His aim is to build up a range of adaptable designs in a limited selection of materials and to franchise the software out to craftsmen based in local gallery-workshops. This will require even more sophisticated programming that can say adjust for the contraction or expansion of materials depending on the ambient temperature, meaning Geoffrey’s role is far from redundant: ‘There is always a preconception that because something is digital it is automatic, but you need to understand how the machine works, just as you would with any tool, if you are going to get the best out of it. And the more sophisticated the tool, the more you need to keep practicing,’ he says. ‘It is essentially a continual learning process.’ Unto This Last www.untothislast.co.uk