Week Eight: How To Design A Chair

How to Design a Chair - the Design Museum.

By sheer unadulterated coincidence, Max bought a book by the same author as one of my previous reviews (see The Language of Things - Deyan Sudjic). Though in this case he's the editor and creator, but this appears to be more of a collaborative effort by the Design Museum, of which he is the Curator.

A curious book, it's not really "how to" design it yourself, so much as "how did" others actually work and what they were influenced by. The back story of the chair and why certain types and materials were used were fascinating. The history of Chippendale and other designers is equally interesting even though I could not have imagined it prior to reading this.

Just when you've had enough of the why and history, the modern age creeps up and Bauhaus and Starck raise their ubiquitous designer heads into the picture and then the intricacy of the design process becomes more transparent as the designers and the designs are still around. And they can spout all the existential quandaries that so often anthropomorphise their work.

And when that gets too arty and subjective, and a little hard to swallow, we follow the cradle to grave design and deploy of the Myto chair by Grcic, and that is the most curiously engaging piece of the book. There's a lot of thought and work going into the design of the chair, there's always more than you know of course. In this case 6 months working on the colour dyes other than black, white and grey, because the 120 degree heat made the dyes spot except in certain colour frequency or mixes.

Plenty of pictures too, a good look at how a chair is designed, and made and appreciated. But not really a How To.