Abbott Miller is a graphic and exhibition designer at Pentagram in New York City. He doesn't normally do chairs, and he doesn't normally work with wood. So in summer 2007, when the Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based organization that seeks to promote the use of sustainable materials, proposed a project that would test out new, ecologically-sensitive ways of working with materials from endangered ecosystems, he jumped at the chance.

Approximately two years of design development, prototyping and travel between New York and Bolivia later, Miller is on the phone from his office in New York City to talk about the result: a chair project that featured Forestry Stewardship Council-certified plywood from Bolivia. The chair sports clean graphic lines and an isamu Noguchi-meets-Danish-mod type of sensibility; it should prove as aesthetically sustainable as the principles of material-extraction that underly the project.

The chair's frame is made out of wood shapes cut out of a flat sheet of plywood; the seat and back are made of a local textile. It can be shipped flat-packed and assembled using a dry rubber mallet. What's more, the chair has been designed so that one sheet of ply yields three chair frames. "Plywood is not the sexiest material; it's kind of like a sheet of paper," Miller explained. "But my standard working process is to go from 2-D to 3-D, so this fit right in."

Waste not, want not, appears to be Miller's motto here. And as he explains, the point was not so much to develop a project in this way and then take it all the way to market; "it was more to give designers the chance to explore the possibilities of the material and the process." Some ended up with saleable goods, others did not. But for the rest of us, for whom ecological imperatives may not always be as top of mind as we'd like, the results are well worth checking out.

Design for a Living World is on till January 4, 2010 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street in New York City.