Category: chair design awards

One Good Chair Award Winner: Posi+ive Lounge Chair

Jittasak Narknisorn

Posi+ive Lounge Chair

I started by finding a way to form a nice clean and comfortable shape with a piece of paper. Because I believe if I can do it in a simple way, it will be easy to make in an industrial system.

The seat was designed on simple rectangular bent plywood with four plus shapes cut through. This design is minimize waste material and allowed the plywood to form curves and bend in more directions to create a nice shape with more ergonomic support.

The legs are one steel round bar. They continue upwards to make armrests for more comfort. The two back legs are positioned to make the chair stackable by taking advantage of the cuts through the seat.

The cushion is made from wool felt fabric. It is the same shape as the seat (rectangular with plus shapes cut through) so it also has minimal waste.

Via One Good Chair: Winners

Duvtal: Green seat for the Bus Stop Pole or Lamp Pole

Duv tal
Waiting for a public bus can be a boring experience. In bigger cities the benches are usually so filthy, you wouldn’t want to sit on them.

duvtal4.jpg

The “Duv-tal” public transportation insta-squat seating system by Catherine Pena could be a solution. It has an inspiring message printed on the surface “You are a role model. You are actively improving the environment by riding the bus.”

Designer: Catherine Pena

Via “Duv-tal”, Instant Seating System by Catherine Pena | Yanko Design

Update August 22, 2008:

I found out this design was a runner up in the One Good Chair 2008 Competition:

Catherine Pena’s own words are much more interesting

Duv-tal was designed in response to America’s obsession with cars and the lack of support for public transportation systems. For those that use public transportation out of necessity, cars symbolize luxury while public transportation symbolizes an individual’s limits. Many bus stops do not have adequate seating and passengers are left to sit on the ground, further reinforcing their position in our economic system.

It is my aim to construct environmentally friendly, efficient, and streamline seating for people who use public transportation, to give passengers a sense of authority and autonomy by providing an elevated vantage point— a position of honor.

Duv-tal utilizes the electric poles that many bus stop signs are attach to. A pole will accommodate a unit of green back-to-back seats that resemble and function much like theater seating and do not exceed the space that a passenger already occupies at the bus stop. Included on the seat, printed text will read: “You are a role model. You are actively improving the environment by riding the bus.”

The very nature of chairs and the additional text will highlight and commend an often-ignored social class, for their environmentally friendly activity that should be recognized in the environmental movement.

Vitra Edition + D & AD 2008 Design Awards: "at One" Chair by Charlotte Kingsnorth

at One Chair

Vitra is one of the major chair manufacturers. It sits as a spider in its web partly in The North West part of Switzerland and partly in the South West part of Germany (Weil am Rhein). Its spider web has many lines into the design community, being it starchitects or graduates from universities or design academies.

One of such lines is with D & AD, a London Based Charity:

D&AD was founded (as British Design and Art Direction) in 1962 by a group of London-based designers & art directors including David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes (who designed the original D&AD logo). The group was dedicated to celebrating creative communication, rewarding its practitioners, and raising standards across the industry.

D&AD annually issues awards for student design. Furniture was one of the 2008 subjects. This year it was sponsored by Vitra Edition.

According to Rolf Fehlbaum, its Chairman:

Vitra Edition is a laboratory that provides architects and designers with the freedom to create experimental furniture objects and interior installations. Their choices of materials, technologies, applications and formal concepts are not limited to the existing Vitra vocabulary, while they have full access to Vitra’s technical know-how. Working without the constraints of market and production logic has a liberating effect and results in surprising solutions and new ways of seeing design.

at One Chair 03
The Vitra brief reads as follows:

Design a sofa inspired by the new Vitra Edition collection that is unencumbered by commercial
constraints and pushes the boundaries of innovative furniture design.
Key drivers

  • Unique
  • Conceptual
  • Experimental
  • Displaying craftsmanship
  • Innovative in form or/and function
  • Use of new or unusual materials
  • Breaking the mould, defying convention

Target audience
Your design is aimed at collectors of art. Each Vitra Edition is strictly limited (usually to 12) and individually numbered and registered. As each piece in the range demands a high value in the market of anywhere between £8,000 and £130,000, your design should reflect this positioning.

The 2008 award winner is Charlotte Kingsnorth of Buckinghamshire New University.

at One Chair 01
She was inspired by the artwork of Jenny Saville and the media coverage of obesity. It is a simple beech wood frame being “devoured” by its obese occupant, in this case an upholstered cushion.

Wow, I wonder whether she also has the honor of her chair being produced in a limited numbered edition by Vitra Edition…..then her name will be vested at once. Congratulations Charlotte!

Via Design Boom and Creative Review

I.D. – 2008 Winners

Stools by Oki Sato

These Stools by Oki Sato earned an I.D. 2008 Design Distinction Ribbon

Oki Sato of Nendo likens this stool’s swooping lines to the ribbons of ballet shoes. It caught the eye of Gillingham-Ryan in particular for its singular shape and simple construction. I think its poetic,’he said. It’s a traditional stool with modern laser-cut technology. To make both the short and tall versions, three steel strips are laser-cut from a single layer then arranged beneath the seat at a standard pitch for stability and structural integrity. (When he saw the stool’s base, which touches the floor only at the apex of each loop, Mount did ask incredulously, Is it possible to make it that stable?  Saez liked the Ribbon’s proportions and praised its having no straight lines besides a band that runs halfway around the tall version’s base to form a footrest. For comfort’s sake, the company also offers a low-profile cushion that fastens magnetically to the seat. Design Nendo (Tokyo): Oki Sato, principal Client Cappellini Materials Steel Software Rhino

Via ID Magazine

The winning entry of the 2008 Wilsonart chair design competition is Eric MacDonald’s


The winning entry of the 2008 Wilsonart chair design competition

Wilsonart today named Eric MacDonald as the winner of its 2008 Wilsonart® Challenges… student design scholarship competition at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF). MacDonald’s winning entry adapts a simple shape into new dimensions.

Yanko Design