Sit & Make: Intro

Chairs. They have been around since the dawn of civilization, evolving and changing as new materials are developed and as trends come and go. It seems that if you want to have a career in Industrial Design, at some point you have to design a chair. Personally, I have never had an interest in designing chairs as I feel that any improvement is incremental at best and wasteful at worst. Instead, I would rather recreate the process of designing chairs and with Sit & Make, that is exactly what I have set out to do.

Sit & Make will be a chair that designs new chairs whenever someone sits down on it. Sensors will measure how someone is sitting on the chair, and the measurements will be sent back to a computer. The data will be processed and a 3d model for a new chair will be output. The posture of the user, whether he/she is using the arm rests, how heavily he/she sits down on the chair and how much pressure is being placed on certain components will all determine the final form.

Sit & Make is a large departure from our current design process, where decisions are made cognitively. Instead, we relinquish all control to our body and just sit back, relax and see what comes out, literally. The real work here is in laying out the framework that converts the sensor data into a design. One approach is to be extremely literal and have the sensors correlate to a digital model of the chair, where if you use the armrest, the new chair will have armrests, and if you sit with more pressure on one side, the chair will be more supportive on that same side. The opposite approach is more abstract, where each sensor correlates to a gravitational point among which a particle travels. As this particle moves in space, influence by the gravity, it leaves a trail, which ends up becoming the structure for the new chair. My aim is to explore both types of options as well as those in between. The sweet spot will be creating an emergent system that has the potential to surprise but is still grounded in the way the user is seated.

There is poetic symmetry in this new design process; we create chairs to sit on them and with Sit & Make, we sit on a chair to create them. I want to explore this relationship and see if I can add to the thousands of chair designs out there just by sitting on one. Who knows, maybe my body will be more inclined to design chairs than my brain.