Seat with a View

Seat with a view is an exploration of unusual ways of thinking about furniture. What is a chair and what more could a chair be? Here I have tried to shift the emphasis from issues of style and image to more psychological use of furniture as tools for reflection.

I wish to provoke the viewer or user to think about the nature of the intervention and the desires that motivate it. Criticizing the limits of objects and their usual functions, I want to explore how objects can appeal more to the poetic and dreamy sides of people. 

A Design Perspective

¨We are lacking a discipline, perhaps an ´objectology´, or an ´ object ethology ´, which allows us to analyse and systematise objects and to formulate the rules and codes of their behaviour....a discipline which recovers and updates the interrupted discourse of material culture, in crisis since the world of objects was taken over by the world of products and the world of consumption¨ Susani, 1992, 42

How can the language of design be questioned?

How can design be used as a commentary?

How can design function as artistic speculation?

How can designers reclaim their position in the critical debate about objects using their own language as a playful weapon to reclaim it?

Jurgen Bey

Jurgen Bey

Family of chairs

One day a family of used chairs knocked at my frontdoor. They had different problems: wear and tear, missing seats and they had be separated from their furniture families and owners. I took them inside and started playing, rearranging and new images started emering. They started looking like people socializing, some turning their backs on each other and others moving closer and even embrasing.

Smoke Furniture

Maarten Baas 

Showing some of the process of making Smoke Furniture

Sketch Furniture

Front Design

Designs for fragile personalities in anxious times

Dunne and Raby Designs use design to stimulate to discussion and debate. Instead of designing objects that stimulate to behaviour, they design objects that stimulate questions. They work within the field of Critical Design, not meaning that they are negative to everything, anti-consumerist and against design. Their objective is to use critical design in terms of critical thinking and that it is about questioning things and to understand what is behind them.

They develope a design approach that embodies an understanding of the consumer as a complex exhistencial being.

In the project ´Design for personalities in anxious times 2004/2005´they focus on irrational but real anxieties such as fear for alien abduction. Rather than ignoring them, like most design would, or to use them to create paranoia, they treated them as phobias as they were perfectly reasonable and they designed objects to humour their owners.

These objects take in consideration the psychological realisme of people and designs for real problems and for how people really are, rather than for how they are supposed to be.

´Hideaway furniture is for people who are afraid of being abducted. Each opens in a surprising way without disturbing objects displayed on its surface. The poses encourage the occupant to feel in control, proud and comfortable, the opposite of a foetal position. There are three versions.´  Michael Anastassiades