Selesa

Selesa: The Comfy Outside Chair

A new form of garden / lounge chair

• weather-resistant the whole year round,
  because of the selected materials
• water-resistant & no ponding after rain/ water contact
  because of ring in center & rounded shapes
• no extra seat cushions necessary like with other garden chairs
  because of elastic cord that adapts to every body type
• can be overturned to front side & stacked on top of each other
  to store away & be more space saving

Funktion follows form: Task

“Form follows Function”
– Louis Henry Sullivan (American architect)

Our task in this course was to reverse this famous quote into: “Function follows Form”,
having more design freedom by being able to choose any shape first and then giving it
a function that fits the form instead of letting the function create the form.
The scope for use was open and undefined. The result should be a product with practical application benefits (e.g. furniture, lighting systems, office and residential accessories, architecture, toys, etc.).
The design process was to be illustrated in a documentation and the final product was to be visualized in a scale model.

Brainstorming

First Forms:
The first shapes were developed by making different 2D and 3D drawings.
Really interesting shapes were obtained based on real objects, as well as based on grid or circular grids.
We experimented with these forms and created even more forms by drawing different combinations or interpretations as well as extruding and rotating them.

Product Ideas Form 1

We selected two shapes that attracted our attention the most. After that, we tried to come up with different products without any limitations. From lamps to armchairs and so on, products were created using the established shapes and playing around with different operations in fusion 360.

Product Ideas Form 2

After discussing the proposed ideas, we chose the chair/sofa as our favourite product to work with. This first sketch
was the foundation for our project and the following process.

Research

Existing Products
After choosing the aspirational product, we started searching for existing chairs with similar concepts: A hard outer shell/ frame and some kind of fabric fixed into it.
What really caught our attention here, were the macrame garden chairs, which our finished chair was inspired by the most. After drawing our first sketches of that idea, we decided it would be perfect to make a new form of lawn chair out of it.

Final Design Process

Modeling

For building the model, we first had to cut the aluminum rods to size. After that we had to heat the rods up so they softened up. Then we could bend them by using some wooden templates, we cut out before, and the engineering drawings as guidelines.
After this step, we had to drill the wholes for the elastic cord into the model. The last steps were to glue everything together, prime, grind and prime the aluminum again, so we could spray paint it black and pull the elastic cord though the wholes to finish it up.

End Result