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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
The standard-offering gliding chairs, and it was hideous, but it was so comfortable,” says Christopher Deam. “I couldn’t get over the beauty of the mechanism and the movement. I was really intrigued by how to create that beauty of movement.”
What brought Deam to that particular moment was his wife’s pregnancy with twins, which necessitated “the requisite pilgrimage to the baby furniture store.” Deam found it intensely intriguing that such …
Gone so much out of design,” says Tom Dixon. “Most designers are not involved in the manufacturing at all. They do something on the screen, S0ni60n6 else cleans up the drawing
then someone else does the model and it gets sent to a manufacturing facility. This project was multidimensional.” The Fresh Fat Chair—and the table and bowls—collapse all these steps into …
Think of materials and what they can do for us. We think that materials are for one kind of thing,” says industrial designer Satyendra Pakhale, speaking of his Flower Offering Chair. “You never think of ceramic and a chair.”
Pakhale got his chance to find out what ceramics are capable of— and to push the material into new territory—when he was invited to a residency at the European Ceramic …
It was a joke. An email arrived that said simply, НЄІІО, we are Seglas. We have seen you on the Internet and would like you to design a chair for us. 3,000 chairs, please. Looking forward to hearing from you.”
Assuming this was just a tease from a colleague or friend, Forster laughed and forgot about the note. Then, a few months later, she received another email from this mysterious …
The machine to make a kind of clothes for the sofa,” says Erwan Bouroullec of the Facett collection. “It’s a bridge between clothing and origami paper folding.”
The machine to which he is referring was something he and his brother, Ronan, discovered on the factory floor at the furniture manufacturer Ligne Roset. “It was in the center …
Dora Chair, Studio Palomba Serafini “in this special moment we are looking out for something more, something, how can we say, like a sort of ITI6trOS6XU3l design,” says Roberto Palomba
“I like masculine and rigorous, and I like geometry and also something that is minimal, but why do I have to be boring?” he asks. “Me too, I also dress …
Decompression Space Chair, Matali Crasset “This chair had a very specific brief at the beginning,” says Matali Crasset. “FeliceRossi gave the same base to four or five designers. They had a chassis, and then they were to do four or five models on the same technique, like a car.”
The base provided by the furniture manufacturer was to be made in roto-molded plastic. “They sent the drawing and said we had to finish it,” says Crasset, who immediately saw …
“This chair is an example of how something that is very complicated for typical indUStrisUzStion can be made,” says Humberto Сатрапа of the Corallo chair designed by him and his brother Fernando
It is also an example of how, in the creative process, nothing really gets lost, and even things that have been set aside for a decade can suddenly spring back …
Clkrak Chair, Adrien Gardere “I wanted to study traditional crafts in India and other places in Asia in order to project how they could be reconsidered and made relevant to contemporary design, not for the cheap manufacturing
and local labor, but on the contrary, for their enriching and inspiring traditional know how, that might be disappearing otherwise.” So, began a great adventure for Adrien Gardere that spanned …
Buttercup Chair, Blu Dot Design and Manufacturing Blu Dotis a trio of college friends who came together after independent careers in art, architecture, and marketing to design and manufacture “furniture for everyday people with everyday needs.”
President John Christakos puts it simply: “The three things we’re about are elegant design, simplicity of manufacturing, and affordability. We’re trying to take the elitism out of design.” With these …
Boson Chair, Studio Patrick Norguet Normally, designers use technology and manufacturing in the service of design, starting with an idea and then finding а ҐҐІбЗҐІБ to make the concept real. For the BOSOII СІІдІґ, Patrick Norguet turned this process inside out
While working with a company that develops prototype cars for Renault and other French car companies, Norguet became inspired by seeing how they fabricated fiberglass, making structures that were both …
Advanced Polymer Cantilever Chair, Pearson Lloyd
“I don’t think you stumble across innovation,” says Luke Pearson, of PearsonLloyd. “You have to find a Strategy to get there. “You have to find a way to create from …
Design Secrets: Furniture 50 Real-Life Projects Uncovered
Designers are generally a dissatisfied lot. When they use an object, they want to change it, redesign it, make it better, or make it more closely fit their idea of …
