John Paananen is a designer, maker, and builder. Paananen draws from a childhood filled with play and interaction with the natural world around him. He now takes that sense of play and puts it side by side with critical thinking.

My work tends to probe and poke humanity’s relationship with nature, economics, technology, consciousness, and civilization in search of meaning and substance from the semblance of ‘modern’ life.

This critical commentary regarding western civilization is intended to highlight some of its fallacies and lies. It is important for me to create awareness of these problems and create beauty from abstract and malicious concepts. With my work, I intend to change the way people view their own habits, lifestyles, and values.

The idea for Bamboozled came from my cynicism for manufacturers green washing materials. In research of material claims, there’s always the back story to a material or product. It’s a story from its “birth” or cradle to the marketplace to its end life, whether it be death in disposal or rebirth through reuse or recycling. In peeling back claims of sustainability, there are factors unaccounted for in extraction, processing, reprocessing, transportation, inequitable labor practices, and ecological impacts. The extent that a material or product influences life and the earth is vast. While there are some systems set up to measure impacts in creating a material or product, there is nothing holistically comprehensive.

In consideration of Plyboo as a building material, I decided that I would instead use another product that, like Plyboo, traveled on a freighter thousands of miles from another continent, Baltic birch plywood. I decided to mimic the image and texture of processed bamboo ply to create the characteristics of Plyboo within the first layer of birch. This process involved the manipulation of bamboo ply imagery and laser etching the image into the plywood.