Machine for Sitting

Machine for Sitting Veronica Villhard Fall 2014

Table of Contents PART ONE:

Research on Sitting 6

Culture of Sitting in Japan 8 Seeking Comfort 10

PART TWO: Visual Chair Dissection

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Summary 14 Images 16

Reflection

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PART THREE: Machine for Sitting... in a Day 20

Summary 22 Images 24

Reflection

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PART FOUR: Meet Your Seat

PART FIVE: Machine for Sitting

Summary and Reflection

The Process

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For cardboard... a material not to be underestimated.

PART ONE: Research on Sittin 8

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The Culture of Sitting Down in Japan Summary

In ancient Japan, the hakama and obi (traditional clothing) helped reduce back pain while people sat on the floor or worked in the rice fields. Today, these traditional garments are not worn as frequently and sitting on the floor is not as common as it once was and both have affected the comfort for Japanese individuals. Chairs originally came to Japan in ancient times from Mainland China. The chairs did not stick with the commoners and were only used in temples and courts for a short while. A ‘seat’ did not work well within the design of the traditional Japanese home.

Space, in Japan, is centered on the sitting person. Being lower to the ground physiologically creates a better atmosphere within a space. Sitting = relaxing. By studying sculptures of Buddha, we can learn the perfect, natural sitting positions of our skeletons.

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Reflection

Yatabe

I always knew that Japanese sat on the floor and wore interesting articles of clothing, but I never realized how the two interacted with each other and how important they were to not only the culture but also the body. I had tried sitting on the floor like and eating dinner the way I had seen Japanese do it when I was a child and I found it very uncomfortable. How could any one do this for their entire life? Little did I know, the Japanese way was in fact, with time and proper muscles, the most beneficial and comfortable way of sitting. The most interesting thing I read in the article was about how being low to the ground can effect a space in the mind’s eye.

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Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair Summary

Originally in Italian and then roughly translated into English, Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair is a nearly 70-year-old analysis of furniture and more specifically an armchair’s history, its negative connotation, and the possible ways it can be sat in. Why create a chair that is more unique, rare, and original than any chair before it rather than perfect the design for the simplest and most comfortable chair for taking a rest? If we forget about decoration, for a moment, and focus on making improvements to the function of a chair (or any invention), then the use of that object can become its beauty.

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Munari

Reflection

I found this reading to be a little bit difficult to compute.

I had not realized the armchair was so frowned upon in the 40s. My family has always had armchairs and chairs for function over form. (got to be comfy when watching all those movies) Thinking about the time this article was written, it was just before the Eames office had come up with a not only beautiful, but very comfortable (and simple) chair. There is a great lesson to be learned for this article and that is not to create things for the sake of being unique and different, but to better what has already been done, but needs more thought.

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PART TWO: Visual Chair Disse 14

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Summary In class, everyone found a group of three to four people, picked a chiar out of the 17 or so displayed for us, and discovered as much about the chair as possible before giving a short presentation toward the end of class.

My group recieved the newest chair: a knock-off of the Eames egg chair distributed at World Market.

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Reflection Though we struggled in the beginning to find the chair’s origins, my group ended up learning a lot abou this Eames-esque chair. Between juxtaposition, ergonomics, form, and function, this chair had it all. Comparing the off brand Eames to an Eames original, the major differences we noticed were the quality of material and seemless interaction of materials. Overall, I liked this chair, but there were a few indications of cheap manufacturing and poor material choice.

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PART THREE: Machine for Sitt 22

ting... In a Day 23

Summary In class, we were shown a few ideas on how to build with cardboard before jumping into a timed project. We were assingned a group and then designed and built a cardboard chair in two hours that could hold weight.

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Reflection Erin Plourde was my partner for this activity. It didn’t take us too long to come up with a design that we could both agree on. What made this activity interesting and fun was the fact that we are both industrial design majors--it’s cool to see how two completely different minds from the same major can come together to create a successful chair design. For our chair, we put together X’s using slices of cardboard and used scoring techniques on the cardboard to get a nicely rounded, ergonomic, and aesthetically pleasing design. The time constraint was quite stressful; however, Erin and I worked efficiently together and had a good time creating our chair. Lucky for us, we were able to stand on it.

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PART FOUR: Meet Your Seat 30

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Summary In another assigned group project, Ben, ZZ, myself, and Ashton recieved the Radice Stool to research the form, function, history, and material of the stool. We gave a short presentation covering each of those topics and also came in with a six inch model of the stool made of chop sticks and chip board.

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The Crew

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PART FIVE: Machine for Sitting 36

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Summary & Reflection

The final project was quite a bit of work. I felt like I managed my time fairly well considering all of the constraints and hardships that were entailed in this project. This final project was to build a full-scale chair model using only cardboard. Limitations such as it had to hold the weight of a single person, it had to be a design that resembles our researched chair from the group presentation portion of this unit, and it had to be well-crafted. Ultimately, my chair was quite the success--it held my weight just as planned and I personally consider it good design. Of course, there was a lot of preparation and practice that led up to this final project such as generating sketches, building minimodels, building half-scale models, and creating mind maps consisting of plans for the final design. Overall, I learned a lot from this final project as it taught me a lot about the general design process and how important and tedious it is.

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Sketches

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Models

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The Process

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The Final

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the end