R18 ULTRA CHAIR – Crowd Sourcing for the best Chair Design

R18 ULTRA CHAIR

Crowd Sourcing for the best Chair Design

Not long after I shared Colin McSwiggen’s rant Chairs Suck! Good Chair Design is Impossible!, I found interesting info about the R18 ULTRA CHAIR.

The idea of the two designers is to collect data while the chair is been seated on by the public.

The Idea

The designers Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram are developing a chair within a public testing environment in collaboration with Audi’s Lightweight Design Center using methods borrowed from automotive manufacturing industry.

The R18 ULTRA CHAIR consists of three main components: a carbon composite seat, a carbon-rubber composite back rest and aluminum alloy legs which can be compacted and transported in a lightweight flat-pack box.

Its genesis incorporates crowd-sourced data acquired through thousands of testing sessions using advanced industrial sensors whose data is processed by custom algorithms to adjust the final geometry and construction of the end product accordingly.

The Designers

Clemens Weisshaar

Clemens Weisshaar (DE) was born in 1977 in Munich. After an apprenticeship as a metal worker he studied product design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art in London and was an assistant to Konstantin Grcic for three years before founding his first office for design in 2000. Weisshaar lives in Munich.

Reed Kram

Reed Kram (SE) was born in 1971 in Columbus, Ohio. After studying science and mathematics at Duke University he completed his design training at MIT in Cambridge. He was a founding member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Media Laboratory with John Maeda and a Fulbright scholar. Kram lives in Stockholm.

Let’s see what they will find.

Priceless Chair


Text-Them-Home-Priceless-Chair

Priceless Chair

This strong photo came along on FaceBook and I placed it on Chair Blog’s FB Wall with the caption Priceless Chair. When I opened FB this morning it appeared the photo had attracted over 40 likes itself. That got me curious about its provenance. Unfortunately it appears there is no larger format available at the moment. The sign next to the person is barely readable apart from the Text Them Home

Text Them Home

When I searched on Text Them Home I hit the source. It turned out the Los Angeles based charity The Weingart Center partnered with ad agency David & Goliath to promote the “Text Them Home” fund raising campaign that integrated homeless volunteers and art.

Street Art Project for the homeless

A chalk artist used the sidewalk as his canvas and drew simple, yet realistic scenes around homeless individuals lying or sitting on the street. A sign asked for a $10 donation to the Weingart Center accompanied by the message: “Text Them Home, text HOMELESS to 50555 and help the 50,000 Homeless in LA find a new place to call home.” MSG/ DATA rates may apply. Full terms at mGive.com/T and read the privacy policy. All proceeds will benefit the Weingart Center’s many homeless assistance programs.

I’m just wondering why they didn’t use social media more and better to spread the word.

UPDATE: To make it more convenient for all of us, here’s a little more insight on the project left in the comments section below by Jordy who works for the Weingart Center (the one that launched the Text Them Home campaign). More information on the campaign can be found on their website here, as well as on their YouTube channel here (including the video in which the photo above was taken). The first photo in this post is also a new addition.

Red Chair by Robert Whitton

Red-Chair-by-Robert-Whitton

In researching Robert Whitton’s chair design it hit me all of a sudden that color makes the design. If you compare this red one with a similar prototype from him, you’ll come to the same conclusion: Bright colors give a completely different perspective.

Beast by Neri Oxman

Beast-by-Neri-Oxman

Beast-by-Neri-Oxman-Upside-Down

Beast Lounge Chair Study

Beast is an organic-like entity created synthetically by the incorporation of physical parameters with digital form-generation protocols. A single continuous surface, acting both as structure and as skin, is locally modulated for both structural support and corporeal aid. Beast combines structural, environmental, and corporeal performance by adapting its thickness, pattern density, stiffness, flexibility, and translucency to load, curvature, and skin-pressured areas respectively.

Neri Oxman

Architect and designer Neri Oxman is assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Mediated Matter research group. Her group explores how digital design and fabrication technologies mediate between matter and environment to radically transform the design and construction of objects, buildings, and systems.

And if you put it upside down we are at our usual quest again: Chairchez La Femme (look for the lady).

Via Neri Oxman.

Update

Just one day after this post Neri is featured in Arch Daily.

Last edited by Guido J. van den Elshout on July 19, 2012 at 4:47 PM

Meanwhile on Pinterest: Pink Cadillac Sofa Love

Pink Cadillac Sofa
And a real 50ies style Pink Cadillac Sofa.

Meanwhile on Pinterest: Pink Cadillac Sofa Love

Source: chairblog.eu via GJE (yes us) on Pinterest

Probably our most popular sofa post on Pinterest

Just by way of experiment I’m embedding one of our pink chair pins here. Originally posted in 2011. On Pinterest it has 51 likes and 233 repins thusfar…

And the Source?

Always nice to source the stuff and I have found it: Yab Design, a company with apparently a couple of fellow Dutchmen as backers who produce this in Taiwan.

By the style of the site Emporium of Art is their Australian distributor.

Update

I knew I’d been staring at Yab’s site before. Now I know. It was in relation to a fruit chair: Green Apple Pod Chair.

That brings me on another thought: One of our avid readers admitted somewhere being inspired by us to create a Pinterest Fruit Chair board. And so the circle is round.

Next part of the experiment is to see if we can pin this post again;-). Yes we managed!