My capstone project was born out of a personal project that I started on a whim over the summer before my senior year. I saw a somewhat obscure video on youtube about growing a leather alternative in your house. I began to try to grow my own product. I was working in a furniture design studio at the time and I started to wonder if I could combine the two. By the time the school year began I had a strong beginning to a project that quickly grew into an entirely different beast. I wrote a project proposal detailing a system in which a consumer could quickly look up what materials went into the creation of the product they were buying to a granular level hoping that this level of transparency would help the consumer make more sustainable choices when participating in the economy at large. I found that the scope of this project was slightly larger than I could handle in the time frame I was allotted so the project was shifted to comparing a "regular" barstool to a "sustainable" version that I would create and then detail all of the materials that went into creating both and the environmental impact that they both had. To me, the most important part was to show that even my hyper sustainable version of the stool was not without its flaws and that everything has an impact and it is important to do better in steps rather than wait for the perfect solution. I am currently working on methods to keep the product environmentally friendly while making it waterproof all the while looking into scaling the project to a financially stable business.