User Designer

Run, don’t walk, and watch video 1 and video 2 about Chishen Chiu’s FlexibleLove experimental furniture.

The seat has drawn lots of attention in the blogsphere over the last few weeks. I wonder what draws people’s attention to it? Are they interested because the seat is different? Do they imagine how they’d use the seat in their living spaces? Would it solve a problem, i.e. maximizing seating room when visitors call around? Does its attaction lie in letting people realise aspirations of designing and building their own furniture?

From the videos it looks like the range of possible physical designs is limited but it is very very easy to reshape. As we move towards smarter materials, such as shape memory alloys, can we retain that ease of alteration? The flipside of ease of alteration is there’ll need to be some way of locking things into a shape.

Bean bags are an example of a readily reshapable seat that has no shape memory. I’ve a bean bag at home and every now and then I find that sweet spot where its really comfortable and feels fitted to my body shape. When I get up I know that by the time I return to the bean bag it’ll have “forgotten” my shape. This makes me loath getting up. Though a potentially beneficial side effect of the shape forgetfulness is a form of subtly enforced stillness and calmness.