News
Seminar on Eames/Bertoia : Redesigning the Chair
To enable our Product Design students to put their knowledge into practice, our teaching team has set up a seminar dedicated to a key item in design : chairs.
Thinking up chairs is a quite basic activity for designers. One of the most universally widespread furniture items, chairs have been fiddled with a great deal, ceaselessly reinvented and they have always called upon creative skills and the upon most advanced technologies. Designing innovative types of chairs is a quite complex process in that implies managing a wide range of requirements (structure-related, mechanical, ergonomic, aesthetical requirements...).
Drawing inspiration from two models that have had a strong and long-lasting impact upon the chair manufacturing industry - the first chair ever molded in resin and glass fiber, Dining Side Chair , thought up by the Eames couple in the fifties and the Diamond Chair (a chair made out of steel) by Harry Bertoia - we have brought to the fore the most innovative and efficient formal codes, production methods and marketing of an era - following from the US war effort. Indeed these two now mythical items offer significant examples of an approach to technological-innovation-oriented design that has achieved a yet unrivalled commercial success.
This short-term assignment given to second-year students in Product Design was meant to help them understand the codes and to reformulate these very codes and refresh them by taking new modern-day requirements into account (E-commerce, eco-friendliness, materials...). This initiative aimed to have our students identify the aesthetic codes prevailing in our times by merging and appropriating the two world-famous chair models. In the end 9 concepts and prototypes were brought to completion by the students in March 2009 and then exhibited in the lobby of our institution in May 2009.
Nicolas Prioux
Studies Coordinator -
2nd and 3rd Year Product Design Curriculums
