Louise Brigham (January 1, 1875 – March 30, 1956) was an American early-20th-century designer and teacher. She was a pioneering champion of the use of recycled materials in furniture design. A system she invented for building furniture out of packing crates represents one of the earliest to adopt a modular approach to the design of individual units. She also founded one of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture companies, as well as the Home Thrift Organization (HTA) to teach woodworking to New York City boys. In 1940, she received a medal from the HTA in honor of her quarter century of service to the organization.

Louise Ashton Brigham was born in Boston, the fourth of five children of William Cleveland Brigham (b. 1840) and Maria Wilson Sheppard Brigham (b. 1845). She had an older brother, Waldo (b. 1869), and an older sister, Lucy (b. 1873). Another sister, Emma, was born four years before Louise but died in infancy. The final child of the family, Anna, was born a year after Louise. When Louise was only two years old, her mother died, and she was to lose her father when she was just 19.

Brigham studied art and design in New York at the Pratt Institute and the Chase School of Art (which became the New York School of Art in 1898 and is known today as Parsons The New School for Design), as well as at art schools in Europe.

At some point in the late 1890s, Brigham became involved in the settlement house movement and established Sunshine Cottage in Cleveland, Ohio. The 1900 census lists her as a teacher and "settlement worker" in Cleveland, living at Hiram House, a settlement house founded by George A. Bellamy. In the early 1900s, she founded another settlement house in Cleveland, Sunshine Cottage.

Information about Brigham’s youth and the circumstances of her upbringing is scanty. Her father was an apothecary; the 1880 census shows the family living in Medford, Massachusetts. Given that Brigham seems never to have had to work for a living and that for much of her adult life she was not supported by a husband (she did not marry until the age of 41), it seems reasonable to deduce that her family was relatively well-off for the time.

During her early 30s, Brigham traveled widely in Europe, staying abroad for much of the period between 1905 and 1910. As she herself put it in a 1913 interview: "I spent the biggest part of five years in Europe, studying various kinds of handiwork with the peasants and the artists of nineteen different countries." Her destinations included the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

Highly influential for Brigham's later design work were two summers spent in a coal-mining camp on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, which sits well above the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago. Brigham does not precisely date these two summers in her published writings, but a reference to a visit by members of an expedition led by the American aviator Walter Wellman suggests that one of them was 1906, the year that Wellman set up headquarters in the Svalbard archipelago in an attempt to reach the North Pole by airship. Brigham stayed in a camp managed by John Munro Longyear, a fellow Bostonian of her father’s generation. In 1905, Longyear had co-founded the Arctic Coal Company to carry out mining operations in an area along the west coast of Spitsbergen that came to be called Longyear City (today Longyearbyen). The camp housed 80 men at the time Brigham was there—rising to several hundred in the years leading up to World War I—and conditions were extremely primitive. Enough food and equipment had to be brought in by ship during the summer months to supply the camp during the eight months it would be cut off from the outside world by winter ice, and the result of this stockpiling was large stacks of empty boxes. Under these difficult conditions, Brigham undertook to design what she called "box furniture" for the camp out of those cast-off packing crates, following up on some earlier experiments along the same lines.

In 1909, Brigham published a book of her designs for building furniture entirely out of packing crates entitled Box Furniture. Illustrated with line drawings by the interior designer Edward H. Aschermann (whom Brigham had met through their mutual friend, the Viennese Secessionist architect-designer Josef Hoffmann), Box Furniture was a how-to manual for a target audience of modestly skilled working-class householders. It offered dozens of different furniture plans, advice on how to select and break down crates, instruction in basic carpentry, and a list of necessary tools. Designs were grouped into suites for specific rooms, as well as organized along a trajectory of increasing complexity. Brigham also offered complementary advice on curtain materials and overall color schemes.