I know, you're stunned. Before I get carried away with the details, take a look at what happens when you try to mold the goo I've been working with:
SO! "A Chair?!" I hear you cry. Yes, a chair. When I was going through my research and writing the process of my work for my thesis, the logic just started to fall into place for me.
"Looking at the newest manifestation of the project, the next stop on the thought train, we find the call for people to play and live in moderation. An inspiration here comes from Victor Papanek's book Design for the Real World, where he shows a structure designed by Steven Lynch that “provides eight more positions for restless children” in school (Papanek 64). Here the idea is to allow children that would otherwise be rendered incapable of paying attention because of high energy a way to expend the energy, stretch, and still participate in class. This product is for the minority of children who cannot stand still. What if it was the norm and taught children they shouldn't stand still for the six hours of school? What if the structure morphed over time, forcing the children to move in order to stay on it, a sort of slow-motion self-directed exercise routine?
I did some mock-ups the other day to test different radii for the bottom of a seat. My plan is to rout parts of a chair that will be curved, especially the bottom. It will be a section of a sphere and therefore allow the seat of the chair to rock and lean.
The silhouette was one of the more fun parts to design. I had several ideas, from straightening out the sides, to curving them inwards. However, I found that curving the sides outwards was most appealing to me, and as my friend and design confidant Nina said, it's a chair based on roundness, so the sides are most appropriate when round. Another thing to consider was manufacturability. If the sides of the chair curved inwards, the top would have to be routed from both the top and bottom (for the router cannot do undercuts). If the sides curved outwards, everything could be routed from the same side, no problem.
Let me back up a second. With this routing, I am making two chairs: an adult-sized one and a child-sized one. It would have been ideal to make many more than that, but considering that the router is $30/hour to use, and the plywood was $100 just for two sheets, I'm sticking with less is more.
Things I need to consider currently before the routing:
1. Do I try to rout the legs/supports too? To do this, I would need to stick three 4' x 1' sheets together in a way that they could not be broken apart by the router but could come apart by hand (that way I could do 3 legs at the same time, one on top of another).
2. Do I rout other things with the extra material? There are spaces in between the things that need to be routed, and unless I say otherwise, those spaces will just be ground down to nothing. Something I'm considering is routing parts of a sphere that can be then glued together. That sphere could go in the center of the chair where the spherical hole is.
Anyway, that's where I am. I'm meeting with Brian, our thesis adviser, on central campus at noon. Poor guy had to read my last draft in which I had no idea what my project was. Writing that draft got me to where I am, however, and I'm hoping he can give me advice on how to proceed.
Checklist
Accomplished:
Revelations and changes
Found something I actually want to do
Working on:
Making
Writing
To do:
Finish it all by April 7th