Papua New Guinea Observation Report ACIAR Project FST/2009/016

The purpose of this report is to provide a sound understanding of what was observed while in East New Britain [ENB], Papua New Guinea [PNG] on balsa harvesting sites as a non-forester or agricultural expert. The author of this report comes from an academic Industrial Design background. The purpose of travel to ENB was to conduct harvest residue assessment protocol development and implementation and to contextualise Nathan Kotlarewski’s PhD through industry partner interviews and field observations. Observations were recorded by the author as a contributor to the research task with interests and thoughts from a design perspective. This report is a detailed description of the data collection process for residue assessments and to identify design opportunities for balsa. This is not a report to discuss specific data collected from the harvest residue assessments conducted in the field or a presentation of design concepts generated by the author.