Marc Fleischmann: Week 8 - Chair

My idea for the tubular chair design was to create a light but comfortable chair for an office room or your private desk. The design was inspired by the ergonomic shape of a race car seat, this helps to achieve a perfect and healthy seating position. 

The sides of the seat are bent upwards to make it easy to find the right position and will keep you away from sitting crooked on the chair. To make the seat more comfortable it has a pillow on top of it, which flows perfectly along the surface of the chair. The pillow just sits on the chair, it is removable. This makes sense for either tall people who don't like to sit even higher or just for the case you need to wash or replace the pillow. The back of the chair is bent in a way that supports your spine to avoid getting back problems if you have to sit on a chair for longer times. 

The whole chair is fully covered in textiles, thin bands of fibre are attached on the surface to create a more energetic design. Underneath the textiles there is a shell out of light and stiff compound materials. On the back side of the chair-back and below the seat there are attached pipes out of titanium to give the whole design strength, stiffness and a noble look by still keeping the weight low and providing flexibility in places where it is necessary. The chair legs have a tapered shape, the thicker part at the bottom increases the stiffness, while the slim ends towards the seat help to keep up the flexibility and makes the whole structure more resilient. The thin pipe that connects the chair-back with the seat creates the same effect.

The SmartChair is a good choice for everyone who is looking for the perfect compromise between a heavy orthopedic office chair and lighter, elegant chair design. This chair combines the advantages of both.

Before I started modelling the chair, I looked up the common sizes and measurements for a chair on the website of a design company that builts highly ergonomic chairs. I tryed to stick as close as possible to the measurements they provided. Finally I created this design by starting with a 2D drawing for all parts. Then I used curve2view and bend commands to create the shape the chair has now. I offseted the surfaces and blended them, to create the pipes I used contour and extract isocurve commands that I could put into Grasshopper.