He continues, laughing, “Then, I would bring these drawings to friends, and look sad until they gave me money to make prototypes.” This unusual approach to product development goes a long way towards explaining why almost all of his products carry personal names: each has been given the moniker of whoever helped fund their realization. […]
Category: Design Secrets: Furniture 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered
Topografi, Jonas Wannfors “I wanted to do something that would feel soft and look soft, but be made of harder materials,” says Jonas Wannfors of his Topografi seating system
“I wanted to make something of an organic shape so it would feel soft to your body, but is not upholstered. It is hard, but shaped around your body so it feels soft when you sit in it.” The result of this original concept was an easy chair made while still in design school. The […]
Tilt Resin Chair, em [collaborative studio] “The furniture is really an accident/’ says Emmanuel Cobbet of the Tilt resin chair
Asked to design a table for the LA Dining by Design event, he and his em [collaborative studio] partner Mark Yeber decided to take a decidedly different approach to the charge of dressing a table for this gala evening. “We knew that every designer taking part would be decorative. We wanted to look not at […]
Supernatural Chair, ROSS Lovegrove “I don’t want to do dumb, boring rubbish! I just don’t want to live my life that way,” Ross Lovegrove exclaims. “I want to look back and think I’ve been involved in things that have SOITie 5ЄПБЄ in them.”
The Supernatural is his answer to a perceived need for “sense” in a plastic, stacking chair. “Right at the beginning I’ve personally always wanted to do a really good plastic chair,” Lovegrove says. “I don’t do many chairs. But I like the idea of doing things that reflect the culture of the day. If you […]
Stradivarius Chair, Matt Sindall “I knew the plywood had this energy in it, in these layers,” says Matt Sindall. “I didn’t really knOW what the result would be
but I knew some interference would be the result of cutting into plywood with a machine and forming it. I didn’t realize quite how complex it would be. It was quite a surprise.” Ever since he carved a wooden fish as a nine-year-old boy, wood has always fascinated Sindall. “I’ll never forget it. I was […]
Sfera Chair, Claesson Koivisto Rune “He wanted us to do something that had a connection between the West and Japan. We needed to mix these two cultures,” says Ola Rune
of Claesson Koivisto Rune, speaking about the client who commissioned both the Sfera chair and the building that inspired it. “We found the old tradition of putting bamboo screens in front of a house to screen the sunlight very interesting.” The Sfera was designed to be a cafe chair in a “culture house” CKR was […]
Osorom Chair, Konstantin Grcic In an act that would prove prophetic, Konstantin Grcic named his mashed , wireframed computer image representing a kind of public seating Osorom, which is the manufacturer Moroso spelled backward. “It is quite contradictory to what they usually do,” he notes
“A few years ago, Moroso furniture celebrated their 50th anniversary by inviting fifty designers and architects to submit ideas about furniture linked to rapid prototyping. All we had to do was send digital data, and they’d create 3D images and put the design ideas into an exhibition,” he recalls. “This intrigued me because I thought, […]
Muu Chair, Harri Koskinen Friends of Industry
“What I try to do here is to avoid all frills and not-needed bits and parts. And to be honest to the material and to the category,” says Harri Koskinen.
MT Series, Ron Arad “I wasn’t so keen to do this,” says Ron Arad. Tm against doing things in rotational molding because it s a very slow process.”
But the manufacturer Driade had asked Arad to work with them on a project, and they wanted to work in rotational molding. Arad was resistant for a variety of reasons. “It takes about thirty minutes between pieces,” he notes, “where with injection molding, every few seconds you get a new piece. Rotational molding is a […]
Patricia Urquiola says of her design process. “You fall in love with something and then you keep trying until you find a way to use it.”
In the case of the Lazy Chair, the material she fell in love with was a synthetic honeycomb fabric used for terrain embankment filters. Urquiola not only found the dimensionality of the material visually interesting, but its functional properties allowed her to make a chair that was weather resistant, extremely light, and reduced fabrication costs. […]