Chair Design
For this design prompt, students were asked to fashion two chair models out of foam core. One had to reflect the cognitive bias we had been assigned, and the other could be whatever you wanted, simply keeping the idea of manufacturing in mind. I was quite excited to begin concept generation. My personal aesthetic is very simple, so I knew the chair I designed for myself wouldn’t be hard to tie back to mass production.
The first is based upon the idea of joinery and angles. The design is made from four pieces and can be easily assembled without compromising structural integrity. The second is an adaptation of a gaming chair. The conjunction fallacy discusses the use of detailed information and how it affects people’s judgments. Because of this, I created the most state-of-the-art gaming chair, with all of its design attributes put on display. The idea here being that people seeing a chair with many many advanced features would trust that model more than one that seemed less extravagant.
This is the final model for my personal design production chair. As seen in the images, the chair is constructed from four pieces, connecting with tension fit slots. There is no glue or other adhesive used in the final design so it can be dissembled for storage purposes.
This is the model for the gaming chair, representing the conjunction fallacy. The chair has a variety of features like adjustable arms, seat height and rolling speed. It also has a surround sound speaker system and molded back for extreme comfort and immersion into your gaming experience. Anybody using this chair for their gaming sessions will wonder how they could’ve been sitting comfortably for so long.
Overall, I enjoyed this challenge a lot. Taking a medium like chairs, which are conventionally not changed very often, and asking students to redesign them through the perspective of a human interaction is very key to reaching the core of industrial design. This prompt took inventive concept generation and combined it with rapid prototyping to create a riveting exercise everybody could really delve into.
