This year we were asked to design a booth for Alps Sangakukyo and Matsumoto City’s tourism department to display community info and highlight what is happening in the Alps region of Matsumoto.

I worked with the Kind to Nature Festival stage design team in August to build a beautiful stage decorated with fresh birch trees that were harvested in Norikura Kogen’s Ichinose Meadow. After working on the stage and seeing how beautiful the white birch wood made the stage look I asked if I could have it after the festival to use for something in the future.

That something turned into the ALPS OUTDOOR SUMMIT booth design. I used the birch saplings to create poster stands to highlight the different communities in the Alps Sangakukyo area.

The first version had white birch on all four sides and after some testing I settled on using a piece of repurposed cedar as a rail to hang the plywood on between the white birch.