Today, Eva Prelovšek Niemelä, InnoRenew CoE researcher and architect, attended the 10th Festival of Wood in Kočevje, Slovenia. This is a festival that takes place once a year with the aim of increasing the interest of younger generations in the woodworking professions and to promote wood as such.

In the frame of the festival they organized also a Wood tech talk forum. Eva Prelovšek Niemelä took part in this panel discussion and highlighted mainly the topic of design as a driver of new added value and how to be successful in it.

“A well-designed product is first and foremost a durable product,” Eva said and added: “In this times when energy, cyber, health, logistics, transport, military and other wars are raging around us, we are sure that the only possible way to design is with materials that are local and do not require a lot of energy to produce. Material as a basic building block of a design product is increasingly important, both from the point of view of potential realisation, as well as from the point of view of ecology and sustainability. Wood, which is abundant in our environment, is within our reach and offers us many possibilities.”

Of course, there are also challenges when designing with wood, which is why it is important to explore its properties and limitations in order to find innovative solutions that open up new possibilities for using this material.

The opening welcome and speech was done by Dejan Židan, State Secretary at the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology.