TRIO

The objective of this project was to design a chair to be manufactured from a four foot square sheet of plywood, using a CNC router. Each student must select an existing chair to use as inspiration. For this project students were also required to select a design constraint such as no mechanical fasteners, an uneven number of legs, multiple sitting orientations, etc.

Inspiration

Choose an existing chair to inform your design

Bone Chair by Julien de Smedt

Feature

Design a chair with only three legs

Stool 60 by Alvar Aalto

Material

Use only a single four foot square sheet of material

Plywood

Form Development

By placing two legs at the front of the chair, the user has greater support during the acts of sitting down and standing up. The increased stability during the moment when the user’s weight is most active helps to prevent the chair from tipping.

Using Fusion 360 to model and 3D print a scale mock-up of the chair allowed me to test the joinery and assembly of the chair, before building it full scale.

To cut my design, I used a ShopBot CNC router in conjunction with X-Carve to create the tool paths. Because of the four foot square sheet of material constraint, I was impelled to think through each piece of  my design and eliminate anything unnecessary to the design’s structure or function.