SEED – deckchar project

Over this term we will be given a variety of one day projects (SEED projects) which are designed to get our ideas flowing and to pose us with different challenges that we wouldn’t usually approach. We will then have to choose one of these projects to come back to at a later date to work on as a full project, although so far I do not think this is the project for me.

We were given the task of designing our own deckchair, or even just looking more broadly at the folding chair. My first response was to go and do some research into types of folding chairs, and I made a few sketches of designs but felt like I was hitting a brick wall. My main problem was, that while I was trying to come up with an interesting and innovative take on the folding chair, it had all been done before and far better than anything I could come up with in a few hours. It seemed like a fruitless effort to try and reinvent the wheel (or in this case deckchair) in this short space of time, so I eventually decided to create a simple improved variant of the deckchair.

The main problems I had been trying to solve were the issues of storage space, and comfort. One of the best things about deckchairs and folding chairs in general is that they are collapsible and take up very little space, but I was also taking this from the perspective of it being something that would live in our studio, which does not have a huge amount of storage space. But the trouble comes in making storage space that is accessible all the time, when the chair is folded or assembled. The design I settled upon was a standard deck chair, that has added padding to make it luxurious, and then pockets on the back which can be used when it is propped against a wall or unfolded, with your objects still remaining safe inside.

However, even then it doesn’t fulfill my needs of being helpful in the studio, as I was hoping to be able to store work or objects, when pockets really have a limit as to what they can store, being largely flat objects that don’t take up a huge amount of space. Looking back, I should have gone with one of my original ideas of a box that folds into a chair, but I was put off by one of my friends saying she’d seen it before, and that I would struggle to make a maquette of it with the materials we were provided with (coffee stirrers and dowel).

Folding deckchair frame made of coffee stirrers with wire hinges

I cut out two lengths of fabric for the seat

I filled the two strips with scrunched up pieces of felt I found laying around

Then I used a glue gun to create the padding effect

created the pockets by cutting out a rectangle, folding the edges, and gluing 2 sides to the fabric

gluing the fabric onto the frame

The finished chair!

Back view, as you can see the pockets are still accessible

and when it’s folded, although it doesn’t look quite so tidy here

truly the most comfortable deck chair I have ever sat in