I remember growing up in the early days of Ten-25 Software, when one of the items my father used to promote our trading software were sticks of Blackpool Rock, the pink candy with the writing through the middle, that no matter where you bit through it, it said “Ten-25 Software”.

Maybe it was not a conventional way of promoting software to executives in the timber industry, but it did tie in with one of the biggest issues for timber and wood products – that of labelling and identification. How do you easily identify a product that is always being cut up into other products?

One solution, that was a joke in the 1980s when we were distributing Ten-25 rock, was to grow a bar code into the trunk of the tree, so no matter where you cut it there was always a pre-labelled end to scan.

Whilst there is current technology to glue or staple a bar code label to the end of a piece of timber, the future may hold a more subtle way to grow an identifier through the tree.

You may be aware of TED.com, a forum for the greatest thinkers of our time to talk about subjects that they are passionate about. If you watch the news and think the world is a dim and dismal place, spend some time watching the 5, 10, 15-minute talks on TED.com – they are an inspiration.

One of the talks that caught my attention is by Fiorenzo Omenetto (a scientist in the field of non-linear nano materials) on silk, an ancient material that scientists are now putting to spectacular uses.

Identifying markers

In medicine they can grow a replacement hip from silk and the body won’t reject it. Well what if this artificial silk could be grown through a tree, carrying identifying markers?

It wouldn’t affect the use of the material, wouldn’t need stapling on and it would still be in the timber no matter how many pieces you cut it into.

The amount of silk used in a tree could be used to calculate potential yield, and transmitting this information over a WiFi network could give a live picture of yield in a forest, packs moving through the docks, or stock available in a yard.

It may not be silk that proves to be the best material for identifying timber, but the developments in nano-materials is leading to an age of intelligent timber products. Furniture that can identify where every piece in its construction was grown, when it needs a fresh application of oil, how much weight it can carry!

My brother works for a computer games company and he told me of how ‘The Sims’ works (The Sims is a popular game where you create a world with people in it and influence their lives to build a better society). In The Sims you have characters that get washed and dressed, drive to work, doing all the things we do in our daily lives and to the player they seem like clever characters.

Actually it is the things the characters interact with that are clever, so a basin knows how to run water and make a character wash his or her face. Intelligent timber could know what its best uses are for, what knots are in it – volunteering itself for particular orders.

Augmented reality

For the people working in a timber business, a technology that is starting to appear on our smart phones is “augmented reality” – the overlaying of information about an environment onto what we see of the real world.

iPhone Apps like Urban Spoon show which restaurants are in walking distance to your current location, so as you hold your phone up the direction and distance to a restaurant are shown over the image of the street you are standing on.

Similar technology built into spectacles could overlay information about stock and products as someone walks about the yard, identifying the products needed for an order, or quickly performing a stock take.

If this blue-sky thinking seems extreme, and possibly a little ridiculous, imagine going to visit yourself in 1991, 20 years ago. Would that 1990s person believe the ‘current’ you when you said you had the answer to any question in the world in less than a second, shown on a device in your pocket? Would they believe that your car can navigate to any place you ask for, taking into account the unseen traffic on the roads ahead?

Timber, sometimes called God’s plastic, is a wonderful material, with a warmth and soul in its myriad uses. These future technologies could help us make smarter use of this incredible product in an information age.