Designer Louise Brigham developed her idea of building furniture out of discarded boxes during the summer of 1906 whilst on holiday in Norway. Situated in a camp north of the Arctic Circle, little lumber was available, and Brigham began to experiment with crates that had been emptied of provisions in order to create furniture for her portable home. 

This travel, along with her education and woodworking skills led Brigham to write Box Furniture: How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home. The innovative book explores sustainable design and do-it-yourself endeavours.

The book details the origins of her idea and includes a section on the basic tools and techniques required to build furniture, along with twelve chapters on the construction of box furniture for domestic use. The book contains illustrations of every piece of design, as well as 15 illustrations which show the placement of box furniture in different rooms of a house. Next to the latter illustrations, minute instructions describe the chosen materials, colour schemes, motifs and techniques used to create Brigham’s interiors. The book was illustrated by the interior designer Edward H. Ascherman, an American designer born to German parents, whom Brigham met while studying in Vienna under the tutelage of Hoffmann at the Kunstgewerbeschule.

Brigham envisioned box furniture as a means of helping people in difficult situations furnish their homes and find skilled jobs. Following her publication, thousands of Americans experimented with do-it-yourself furniture making. In 1910, the Home Thrift Association she founded started to offer free woodworking classes for boys and girls. In the first year only, more than six hundred young New Yorkers signed up and Brigham went on to lecture on her work across throughout the country. Today, Brigham can be regarded as a pioneer of social design.

Louise Ashton Brigham (1875–1956) was a designer and social activist. She trained as a designer in the mid 1890s  at the Chase School (now Parsons) and at the Pratt Institute in New York City, where she undertook courses in the Domestic Art, Domestic Science, and the Kindergarten departments. Brigham also studied in Europe sometime between 1897 and 1910. While abroad, Brigham took courses in woodworking at the School of Crafts in Nääs, Sweden and the National Industrial School in Copenhagen.