Three Selected Publications
Concrete cracks, wood burns: Competing narratives in the construction sector
International Wood Products Journal 2024
Innate to the human condition are rules of thumb, or heuristics, important for our survival. It is widely understood that wood is combustible, and concrete is prone to cracking. These factors significantly drive our perceptions concerning the selection of materials used in construction. The present study aimed to better understand the competing narratives employed by supporters on both sides of this construction ‘material warfare’ and specifically investigate their advantage and disadvantage arguments. To meet our research objective, we looked at news media articles through Google search tool using keywords ‘wood vs concrete building construction’. The articles are published as early as 2006, and along the years, the competing conversations are more prominent with the ‘birth’ of mass timber in North America. The topic is also becoming an interest for specific audiences, such as architects, engineers, and insurance companies. Through inductive thematic analysis of 100 articles, we find that cost and sustainability are two dominant factors in the narratives. Each industry claims to be more cost effective and sustainable than the other, typically sniping at each other. This rhetoric, we argue, will not be beneficial for society and environmental justice. A sustainable built environment requires cross-sector collaboration between wood and concrete companies to handle difficulties that they cannot address successfully within their own sector.
Who Prefers Legal Wood: Consumers with Utilitarian or Hedonic Shopping Values?
Forests 2023
Although certification is perceived to be beneficial for enhancing forest sustainability and open access to green markets, certification practices in Indonesia face controversy, particularly in its wood-based industry. We aim to approach this issue from the end-user perspective. Drawing on the theories of value-belief-norm and planned behavior, we examine the psychological aspects of consumers toward legal wood consumption. A survey of 515 consumers showed that individuals with hedonic values tended to have a high perception of green values toward legal wood. Also, when consumers’ hedonic values dominated over their utilitarian consumption, their perception of green values toward legal wood tends to be higher. Based on these results, wood marketers could benefit from directing their communication efforts toward emphasizing the hedonic worth of the product, as opposed to its utilitarian values. It is imperative for distributors and promoters of wood products to carefully deliberate on strategies to effectively elicit the hedonic shopping values that are inherently linked to the utilization of such green products. An illustration can be represented by the case of IKEA in Indonesia. Consumers are probably attracted to IKEA’s neuromarketing strategy, such as their attractive display and labyrinth effect, without realizing that IKEA also applies green marketing and supports green products.
What does the public believe about tall wood buildings? An exploratory study in the US Pacific Northwest
Journal of Forestry 2018
Little is known about what the public thinks of tall wood buildings (TWBs), which are structures made primarily from wood that are at least five stories tall. Understanding end-user beliefs can help the industry address public preferences and concerns. An online panel of 502 residents in the Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, metropolitan areas showed that only 19 percent were familiar with TWBs. The largest percentages of respondents believed that, compared with concrete and steel buildings, TWBs are more aesthetically pleasing, create a positive living environment, and use materials that regrow. However, they also believed that TWBs have greater fire risk and need more maintenance. Sizable percentages of respondents said they did not know about various durability, performance, aesthetic, and environmental attributes of TWBs. There were few meaningful differences between respondents who reported being familiar and unfamiliar with TWBs, but those who were familiar evaluated TWBs slightly more positively.