Wood furniture starts as trees, of course, but Iain Little actually grows chairs practically ready to use. The founder of Full Grown will be one of the speakers at this year’s PINC Conference in Sarasota on December 8. SRQ spoke with Little about his exemplary botanical technique.

What made you first want to try to harness nature to the point where you could shape furniture? Little: It is not so much “harnessing” nature as giving nature a nudge. Nature will ultimately do what nature wants. A tree that looks like it will become a beautiful chair may look like a scruffy bush tomorrow. A tree that looks like a scruffy bush today may turn into a lovely tree/chair tomorrow. We just need some slight but careful human intervention, some nudging. These nudging techniques—coppicing, grafting, etc.—help to nudge nature towards our own human idea of what a chair looks like, or should look like. Thus, human ideas of aesthetics and human ideas of practicality influence nature’s normal course. If Martians were doing it, the Full Grown chair might look more like a Martian chair because Martians would be using Martian ideas to make their Martian chairs. Certainly, each country we introduce Full Grown to will have its own wood species, its own “nudging” techniques and its own ideas of aesthetics. The Full Grown model is a global model.

You  work to create furniture without harming the planet. Can you describe the significance of this paradigm shift? Steve Jobs persuaded John Skulley to join Apple by asking him, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Human behavior can change. Human behavior must change. The world’s wooden furniture market is worth $250 billion per annum. The USA imports 30 percent of the world’s wooden furniture. Any paradigm shift must start here in the USA. But the effect can be global because everybody needs furniture to sit on, write on, read on or just look at. Even if in some countries like India, people are only just starting to be able to afford furniture. There are 1.3 million schools in India, and in many cases kids sit on the dusty ground. Growing one’s own furniture could have a huge developmental impact.

Learn More about PINC here