Joseph Louis Tan: Design Studio 3A

Today for my Design Studio 3A, we all had a design charette exercise. We had to forms groups of 6 people or more and assemble an IKEA dining chair in 15 minutes. After that, we had to brainstorm on reasons why we hated the design of the chair and its faults, and it was followed by an overall discussion. Thereafter, we had to sketch 5 ideas or more individually within 15 minutes on ways to improve the chair on the problems we had discussed earlier, which again is followed by a sharing of ideas with the group. This task was then repeated for 2 more times on how we can design it better for our physical pleasure and psychological/ sociological pleasures, which was followed by lunch. After lunch, we had to finalize on one of our group idea and do up an A3 presentation sketch and a mock-up model of the design. Finally, each group had to present their ideas and received feedback from our lecturers.

Overall, I really enjoyed the whole experience and it was my first time doing such a design exercise. It was a highly pressurized design thinking exercise and I was thoroughly drained after that.

So here are my sketches from this design exercise (please reminded that these were done in sets of 15 minutes, so do excuse the quality)

Some of my design ideas are on how to make the chair collapsible, or providing the users a routing service to router out the contours of their bottoms to increase their comfort level, or remaking the chair into a stool when the backrest is damaged or even having the users breaking out a piece of the chair seat with them writing a note about a bad memory, instead of throwing the whole chair away when they had a bad memory attached to the chair.

My group's chosen idea was to design add-ons for the existing chair for mothers having a newborn baby or even the elderly. The idea is to allow the user to change the chair into a rocking chair with a more comfortable backrest. As these are add-ons, they will be able to be removed when they are not needed. The proposed material for the add-ons are laminated plywood for its durability. Users will only need to slot the chair's legs into the rockers and attached the backrest with a C-bracket onto the chair. It could be sold beside the chairs in the IKEA showrooms and shelves as an optional product. As the design for the add-ons are meant to fit in the style and cost of the existing chair, the price of the add-ons will be generally cheaper than the users buying another new rocking chair.

Here are the pictures of the final design.