Design

Soft Wood

Type

Academic

Instructor

Daniel Tish

Team

Betty Chen, Qingquan Sophia Chen, Anantha Padmanabhan Vijayakumar Sangeetha

Role

Prototyping, bending tests, photoshoot

Location

Cambridge, MA, USA

Year

2025

Soft Wood

As a team, we are interested in exploring the potential of wood beyond its conventional reading as a rigid structural material. Wood is often associated with strength, linearity, and load-bearing clarity, but we began by questioning this assumption: what if wood could be soft? Not soft in a literal sense, but capable of bending, curving, and forming continuous volumes. Through digital design and joint-based assembly, this project investigates how wood can move from a purely structural role to an expressive, surface- and space-forming material, revealing another side of wood through curvature and volume

© 2026 by Anantha Padmanabhan