Tag: Reed Kram

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.