Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival: designers Industrial Facility will show a prototype of an aluminium chair inspired by handrails at their east London studio on Saturday.

“Through a lot of thinking and walking I realised that over the course of the day we’re putting our hands on so many handrails all around London,” Sam Hecht of Industrial Facility told Dezeen. “I thought it would be interesting if the diametre of the armrest of the chair was the same as a handrail, which means that the armrest is much more chunky than you would normally find in an aluminium chair.”

Thick extrusions form the front leg, armrest and back leg in one piece on each side of the Alumi chair.

“It’s all made out of aluminium and it’s a very thin gauge, so it’s super light and yet it has this kind of solid, chunky appearance,” Hecht added.

The chair will be previewed as part of a one-day show called Pop-Down at the Industrial Facility studio at 20 Britton Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1M 5UA on Saturday 22 September from 10am to 6pm

See all our stories about Industrial Facility | See all our stories about the London Design Festival

Movie: Alumi by Industrial Facility
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Dezeen’s London Design Festival map

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The map above is taken from Dezeen’s guide to the London Design Festival, which lists all the events going on across the city this week. We’ll be updating it over the coming days with extra information on our highlights so keep checking back. Explore the larger version of this map here.

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at Pop-Down appeared first on Dezeen.

Paris Design Week 2012: architect and designer Jean Nouvel unveiled a collection of aluminium chairs for Emeco at his studio in Paris this week.

“I wanted the lightest object possible,” Nouvel told Dezeen at the launch on Monday evening. “You can see how the material moves with the body and I spent a long time designing the curve of the chair.”

Emeco has been manufacturing aluminium chairs since they made the famously robust Navy chair for the US government in 1944.

Emeco have previously collaborated with other well-known architects and designers – see Norman Foster’s designs for the brand here and chairs by Philippe Starck here.

See all our stories about Jean Nouvel »

See all our stories about Emeco »

The following information is from Emeco:

The So-So Chair

Emeco is launching a new collection together with the French iconic designer Jean Nouvel. The So-So collection, include chairs and stools made of 80% recycled aluminum, reclaiming both post-industrial and post-consumer waste. The chairs and stools are lightweight and durable, all handmade in the factory in Pennsylvania, USA, using the same process as the famous Navy chairs from 1944. “I just kept the same DNA and evolved it into a new light and comfortable chair.” Says Jean Nouvel at the preview launch in Paris Sept, 2012. “Jean Nouvel has really managed to take the back bone of Emeco and leverage a new vocabulary,” says Emeco’s CEO, Gregg Buchbinder. Together Emeco and Jean Nouvel have highlighted the sustainable philosophy of using what others discard to make something beautiful and long lasting. “Working with Emeco is like being in a field of wheat. The crop is grown and my job was to simply harvest.” Says Jean Nouvel.

First installed at the Hotel Sofitel Vienna Stephandom

In true minimalistic Jean Nouvel spirit, the So-So chair follows what Nouvel often calls the quality of “Nothingness”. Curating a lean balance against the multi-colored illuminated video ceilings by Pipilotti Rist covering the cathedral inspired Hotel Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom in Austria. The So-So chair was first installed in the public spaces of the Sofitel flagship, acting as an intimate embracement and a perfect contrary to Rist’s bright and colorful works allowing the guests to engage in the views of the city. The public interiors at the dining areas are dominantly kept its raw grey, as for the So-So chair, made in hand brushed aluminum using the same lean process as its mid century antecedents. “Architecture is an opportunity, to continue games begun by others, years or even centuries ago,“ says Nouvel about the project.

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for Emeco appeared first on Dezeen.

Paralympic athletes headed for London 2012 have inspired transport design studio Priestmangoode to create a conceptual airline seat with a detachable wheelchair.

The Air Access system would mean passengers with reduced mobility could be helped into the wheelchair in the departure lounge – where there’s more room to manoeuvre than on the aircraft itself – and remain seated until they reached their destination.

Once on board, the wheelchair would simply clip back into a fixed seat frame to form a normal aisle seat, which could also be used by passengers without disabilities on flights where the wheelchairs weren’t needed.

Watch Paul Priestman talk about design for aircraft interiors in our movie interview here or below.

Here’s some more information from Priestmangoode:

As Paralympic athletes arrive in London this week, few of us ask ourselves how they travelled here. Britain’s leading transport designers, Priestmangoode, have been thinking about the issue, and are unveiling a design that will transform air travel for passengers with reduced mobility (PRMs).

Air Access is a concept that facilitates air travel for PRMs by enabling an easier transition from gate to aircraft. The ingenious design aims to reduce the indignity and discrimination that PRMs face when travelling by air.

Paul Priestman, founding director of Priestmangoode, explains: “We have been designing aircraft interiors for over fifteen years and always work to improve the entire passenger journey, from home to destination. At present there are some accessibility regulations on aircraft, however they cater for only the most basic requirements. As a result, passengers with special needs often face considerable difficulties when travelling by air. “

“These difficulties generally go unnoticed – very few members of the public are aware of the anxiety and discomfort PRMs can experience when travelling. But it is a matter of equality that people with reduced mobility should have the same rights to a quality passenger experience that able-bodied people have.”

Priestman continues “As designers we strive to improve things, not just for the immediate future, but for the long-term. A demographic shift is sweeping across Europe: the population is ageing, life expectancy is increasing, obesity levels are rising and PRMs account for a larger proportion of the population than ever before. Air Access is a much-needed concept for the future of airline travel that will provide a pleasant experience for passengers with disabilities orreduced mobility.”

Jennifer Howitt Browning, assistant coach of the women’s Paralympic Wheelchair Basketball team and former Paralympian comments: “Air Access is a fantastic idea and an ideal initiative for prompting the dialogue on how to make air travel accessible for passengers with disabilities. I have heard of too many cases in which airline passengers have been made to feel like second-rate citizens, which is both distressing and demotivating. I know this only too well. I travel by air frequently and at times it has been an ordeal. I applaud any initiative that tries to tackle this problem, and hope that Air Access will stimulate constructive discussions between airlines, airports, seat vendors and disability bodies.”

Why do we need Air Access?

» Currently, around 20% of the UK’s adult population has some form of disability or mobile difficulty. For this demographic air travel can be fraught with problems.

» Ground and airline staff are often inadequately trained and unaware of their legal obligations.

» The absence of a systematic process for boarding and disembarking PRMs can lead to confusion and complications for airline staff.

» For PRMs, being physically assisted into and out of airplane seats can be stressful and demeaning, and inflight toileting can be difficult.

» It’s imperative that we start thinking today about implementing change to cater for future generations of air travellers.

How it works

The Air Access concept consists of two elements: a detachable wheelchair by which passengers can be transported onto and off of the plane, and a fixed-frame aisle seat on the aircraft into which the wheelchair is mated to create a regular airline seat. Ground services staff assist the passenger into the Air Access wheelchair seat in the departure gate or on the jetway, where there is ample space to manoeuvre. When seated, the passenger is wheeled onto the plane.

Once onboard, the wheelchair’s 360-degree pivoting wheels enable it to be slid sideways into the fixed-frame aisle seat without the passenger needing to get up. When the two elements are positioned, they are locked together for the duration of the flight. On arrival, ground staff simply unlock the wheelchair seat, slide it out into the aisle and wheel the passenger to the jetway or arrival gate. Once there, the passenger returns to his or her own wheelchair or zimmer frame, or transfers into the airport’s wheelchair.

Benefits of Access Air

» The Air Access seat could be installed in every aisle seat of the aircraft. In a wide-body this would be four seats per row, meaning dozens of PRMs could travel on any given flight. This is particularly useful when large groups of passengers with reduced mobility travel together eg. Paralympic athletes

» Increased safety for passengers. Passengers do not need to be handled by airline staff in the tight confines of the aircraft

» Easier to use toilet facilities in flight. Passengers only need assistance to unlock their seat and wheel to the nearest toilet.

» The chair has a removable seat pad. Many passengers with serious disabilities, for instance spinal injuries, need to sit on their own purpose-designed cushions. Passengers can customise the Air Access seat to suit their individual needs.

» Anyone can sit in the seat. As the access seat integrates seamlessly into the aircraft, the airline does not lose seating space if there are no PRMs travelling.

» The Air Access concept is suitable for all aircraft types, though offers particular benefits to long haul, wide body aircraft—both for passenger experience and cost benefit to airlines.

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Priestmangoode appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen filmed a series of interviews with Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic about 59 objects from their collection for the Design Museum Collection App for iPad, which is available to download free from the app store here.

This film features extracts about the developments in chair design over the last 150 years, from the first mass produced Thonet No. 14 chair in the 1850s to the use of tubular steel as a material for furniture in the B3 (Wassily) chair in the 1920s, all the way to creating the shapes of Jasper Morrison’s Air Chair using gas injection at the turn of this century.

You can listen to Sudjic talking about classic design for driving in our earlier movie and his explanation of the way design has changed the way we listen to music in another.

Download the Design Museum Collection App »

Here are some excerpts from the app:

Mould for Manufacturing Thonet No. 14 chairs

As techniques using steam bending evolved, Thonet was able to produce a chair from six pieces of wood, ten screws, two washers and some wicker for the seat. The resulting chair, the Thonet No. 14, became one of the first genuine consumer products and is often cited as the most successful industrial product of the nineteenth century. Several million had been manufactured by 1900. This mould for the chair is from the 1850s.

Tulip chair (model 150)

Designer of the chair, Eero Saarinen was fascinated by the potential of plastics, but the limitations of early fibreglass reinforced polyester thwarted his efforts to make the world’s first chair from a single moulded element.

Panton Chair

Verner Panton was the first to succeed where others had failed, by producing a chair from a single element. Practical and comfortable, the cantilevered form is based on the same principles designers Marcel Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe used in the 1920s. Early fibreglass versions were brittle and it was not until polypropylene was invented that a suitable material was found.

Wiggle Chair

Best known for his iconoclastic architecture in buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Frank Gehry has also experimented with furniture design throughout his career. One of his Easy Edges chairs, the Wiggle, 1972, is composed of 60 layers of cardboard bonded and screwed together. Gehry transformed an everyday material – the corrugated cardboard from which his architectural models were made – into a solid sculptural form. ‘I began to play with it, to glue it together and to cut it into shapes with a hand saw and a pocket knife,’ he recalled.

B3 (Wassily) chair

Obsessed by the challenge of designing a chair to be built in a factory like a Model T Ford car, Marcel Breuer concentrated on two goals as head of the Bauhaus carpentry workshop. One was to develop furniture from the same lightweight yet strong tubular steel as the Adler bicycle which he rode around Dessau. The other was to design a cantilever chair, or one supported by a single base. His experiments produced the angular B3 chair in 1925, which he nicknamed the ‘Wassily’ after his fellow tutor at the Bauhaus Wassily Kandinsky. Unfortunately for Breuer, the Dutch architect Mart Stam (1899-1986) completed the first cantilever chair before him by making the 1926 Model No. S33 from gas pipes.

Chair no. 406

Conceived as a variation on Alvar Aalto’s earlier laminated wood cantilevered armchair, Chair No. 406 was designed at the same time as Aalto was working on the Finnish Pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Villa Mairea, a house for the industrialist Harry Gullichsen and his wife Maire. A few years earlier Aalto had co- founded Artek, the furniture manufacturer, with Maire Gullichsen and his own wife Aino. Based in Helsinki, Artek produced many of Aaalto’s furniture designs and continues to manufacture them today.

Universale

Originally an artist, Joe Colombo opened a design studio in Milan in 1962 to apply the bold, curvaceous forms – and hatred of sharp corners and straight lines – that had characterised his art to product design. He also strove to apply new technologies to develop new types of furniture. Obsessed by making a chair from a single piece of material, Colombo first tried to develop the Universale stacking chair in aluminium, but then experimented with ABS plastic. Light, portable and easy to clean, the Universale is also adjustable as its legs can be unscrewed and replaced with longer ones. Colombo strove for two years to perfect it for mass production.

Donna Up5 and Up6

The Donna Up5 was regarded as uncompromisingly radical when it was unveiled by the avant-garde Italian architect Gaetano Pesce (1939-) in 1969. Pesce designed it as part of a new series of vacuum sealed upholstered furniture which could be bought in as a flat pack and literally sprang to life once the vacuum seal was broken. Described by Pesce as ‘transformation furniture’, each Up piece is compressed to a tenth of its full size when vacuum-packed in PVC before expanding to its full size after the pack is opened. The Up5 became unexpectedly popular in the UK when it was featured as the diary room chair in the 2002 series of the reality TV show Big Brother.

chair_ONE (above)

Konstantin Grcic’s furniture and lighting designs from the 1990s were informed by pared down purism and technically rigorous forms suited to their function. Yet Munich born and based Grcic has, in recent years, embraced a more expressive element in his work – defining function in more emotional terms, combining formal strictness with wit and subtlety.

Intent on creating deliberately ‘strange’ and open forms through advances in computer design software, Grcic started to experiment with shapes that were defined by how the object would be used, rather than by expectations of how they should look, or the technical conventions of craftsmanship. The results, such as the 2002 Chair_ONE, are blunt in style, with irregular planes jutting at unexpected angles.

Grcic’s starting point for the Chair_ONE was the everyday football – a collection of small, flat planes assembled at angles to create a three-dimensional form. By die- casting the chair from aluminium – a process rarely used before in furniture manufacture that involves casting liquid aluminium alloys into metal moulds using gravity, low pressure and high pressure – Grcic was able to produce the complex skeletal one piece seat and back in a cost effective method with minimal machining.

Air-Chair

British designer Jasper Morrison began work on his stackable 1999 Air-Chair when Alberto Perazza, the owner of Magis, showed him a length of tube made by gas injection. ‘The design began from the leg up, describing the tubular structure of a chair to which a thin skin is applied for the seat and back, in much the same way as the earlier Plywood Chair uses a thicker plywood for the structure and a thinner plywood for the seat,’ recalled Morrison.

Aeron

In the early 1990s, the Aeron office chair was the first seat to address the changing shape of the American workforce with its easily adjustable, thanks to a mechanism found under the seat, optimisation for a variety of users. Designed to an ergonomic standard previously unseen, the chair commanded a huge price. This exclusivity, combined with its ubiquitous presence in expensive offices, helped it to become an emblem for the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.

The Design Museum Collection

The Design Museum Collection is made up by over 2000 objects that range from the early Modernism of the 1900s to the cutting edge of contemporary design. The Collection tells the history of design in mass production and includes furniture, lighting, domestic appliances and communications technology. The Collection is an important record of the key designs which have shaped the modern world.

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chairs appeared first on Dezeen.

The wonky look of this chair by Danish designer Rasmus B. Fex actually makes it stronger.

By tilting the legs and back by 9.5 degrees but keeping the seat straight, Fex removed the need for a stabilising rod underneath.

The chair was selected for use in the Knut Hamsun museum in Hamarøy, Norway, designed by Steven Holl.

We recently featured another design by Fex – an angular milking stool with interlocking legs.

See all our stories about chairs »

Here’s some more information from the designer:

Behind this very simple piece of furniture art craft lies a long and complex process. The chair has drastically changed its characteristics several times along the way. 9,5° started out as an iconic chair. The icon was experimented on repeatedly to explore all aspects of something as simple as a chair, with the purpose of creating an entirely new chair. The ambition was to create an object in the borderland between art and design. Sculptural, yet functional.

The chair is tilted at 9,5 degrees. By tilting the chair and then elevating one end of the seat back to a straight angle, a triangle was created. This actually made the construction stronger and reduced the need for a stabilising cross rod. In conclusion, it’s not always wrong to be wrong. The deconstruction of the original design served a higher purpose.

In 2009, the interior architects behind the Knut Hamsun museum in Hamarøy, designed by Steven Holl, saw the chair in the “Nyttrom” interior magazine and decided to acquire 9,5° as the museum chair. 9,5° is part of Art with Function – Design Without.

Art With Function – without design is a method developed by myself in an attempt to push my thinking outside the box. The tool forces the designer’s thoughts along new paths and promotes a conceptual approach to the design craft. It is a different way to work process oriented. By removing functionality from design, designers are forced to think in a new way. The goal is to reach a new aesthetic in which objects are both art and design.

The process is divided into five acts.

Act 1:    Choose an archetype, which fills a specific function.
Act 2:    Make 10 copies of the archetype.
Act 3:    Remove the object’s function in ten different ways.
Act 4:    Add the old function to all the objects from ACT 3.
Act 5:    Choose one object from Act 4 and make it into a finished product.

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Rasmus B. Fex appeared first on Dezeen.