Method

I wanted this project to have a more modern aesthetic and at the time I was influenced
by Fate Grand Order or more specifically the Hero/Character Meltlilith or Melt for short.  I was drawn to her design for many reasons, and to keep it short it was sharp, cool, and loved the animations. Her design heavily reminded me of modern design with her straight lines and simple but effective color scheme. So I wanted to take those concepts into this chair. As she was heavily inspired around ballerinas. I began to look into ballerinas and more specifically how the foot met the ground.

From these inspirations and concepts for this chair, I developed several different
prototypes via model making. From them, I found a prototype that I thought matched both the inspiration, and also the goals for what I wanted this chair to be. That being again, a chair that is aesthetic, but is a chair no matter the angle. It needed to be decisive in its appearance, and somehow fragile all at the same time.

Reflection: What Worked?

The prototype speaks for itself. In terms of how it was set out to do and what it accomplished within my peers. It was received well by my peers in terms of design. As
mentioned previously, this was a stylized piece of work that is also a chair. It has the potential to become an item at the center of attention. This is key as many “meditation” chairs that you find online often describe themselves to be the gem of the room.  However, at the same time, these “gems” are often modern replicas of Indian Peacock Thrones. Taking a look into the meditation aspect of the ideal. The chair uses the “Seiza” seating from the first project and takes advantage of the research and information gained from it.

Reflection: What Could be Improved?

There are a number of structural issues to this design. While this design actually works
and is a sittable object based on past models of this prototype. This did not translate to the final prototype. The biggest concern of this prototype is that the seating and the legs are barely holding each other together. The main reason for this is due to the area of attachment from the legs to the seat.

Compared to the seating area, the area of attachment is just too small. Only about ⅕ of
the area is supported, and so if users did not sit directly, on the supported area. The seat would snap off from the base. This was not caught during the design process as I did not make a rig for the seating during the model making phase. I was mainly concerned with how the legs were going to look. Throughout this period, I simply had the seat rest on top of the legs. It was only after I had made the whole thing that this error came to light. In conclusion, as much as I would like to say that this is a chair. It is in fact, not a chair. It is a sculpture. A sculpture that just happens to look like a chair.

Another point of failure that could have helped fix this problem was the weight this
attachment had to hold together. The base was made of steel sheet and was incredibly heavy.  Something you wouldn’t really expect from a chair of this height. This should have been done in aluminum as it would have dramatically dropped the weight of the chair and helped with the weight load the attachment had to hold together.

Lastly, the reproducibility of this chair is nonexistent. It is not to say that I could not
make the same shape and size which is easy (as this comes from a two-part mold). But the specific texture of the folds within the seat is impossible to recreate. The folds on the seats were made by accident. Although, I know how they were formed (uneven pressure during the clamping of the two-part mold). I do not know exactly how to reproduce the effect consistently. As such, this is a one-off. Comparing the prototype to the project as a whole, this chair-now sculpture fails in almost every regard. Despite being received well for its design and intentions.