Milan 08: shown at That’s Design! in Zona Tortona last month, What Can You Bring to the Table is a collection of five chairs where each component was designed in isolation without any knowledge of what the other parts would be like.
Each of the five chairs is created in response to a word: vain (above), voluptuous (below), awkward, vicious and androgynous.
The project was inspired by a children’s game where each person draws part of a character before folding the paper down and passing it onto the next person, who adds the next feature without knowing what has gone before or after.
31 students from the industrial design course at Lund University in Sweden took part in the project.
Above: awkward. Here’s some text from the students:
–
What will happen if you let 31 industrial design students work together in a project without knowing what the others are doing? Inspired by the folded sketch, a child’s game where you draw one part of a character not knowing how the previous or next person will draw theirs.
The aim was to design five chairs where each chair in the exhibition represents one characteristic. The inspirational words vain, awkward, voluptuous (above), androgynous and vicious (below) were extracted from the sketch and free for interpretation.
What can you bring to the table is a group project where no one has to compromise. Each part is designed independently without influence from the other participants.
Below: androgynous
–
Posted by Rose Etherington
May 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Fugly. Plus… it’s not design.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:42 am
If the work of Front design, maarten Baas and others is reminiscent to the new realist…, this is just a repeat of a surrealist path. It has been applied to poems, paintings, sculptures, so, why not to a chair? If the game is about being very inspired by the mid-twenty-century art, there is stilll a lot to copy, maybe after that we will see more interesting pieces coming out.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
omg! its like mixing smack and ketamine!
you think NO! but the results just say YES!!!
May 20th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
the “folded childs game” the article speaks of is called “exquisite corpse” and was invented by the surrealists
research people come on!
May 20th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
0_0
May 20th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Jeez, we’re Lucky they didn’t put a dildo in the middle of the seat in that last one.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
what an awkward “s_itting” chair !!
May 20th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
the game I used to play as a child is not good art. exquisite corpse does not need ignorance of its surrounds.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Great!
It made smile on my face.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 am
Isto é o fim do mundo mesmo!!!
May 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am
the problem is that each student appears to have been compelled to create the most expressive form for each component, in a bid to create a clear boundary between each designer’s input. I think the pieces work better in isolation, because then you begin a conversation about archetypes of leg, seat, back support, etc. That would surely be a more intelligent way of presenting the project.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:45 am
It is a collage. It is subversive. The design is dead. Long live design!
September 18th, 2008 at 10:12 am
It looks so elegant-)))))
October 20th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
can be with more language…like chinese translation