![]() ![]() I’m no chair expert, and once I started drawing, I realised that my ‘original ideas’ were all just sad copies of the Panton or Barcelona chair…. Most people don’t spend their lives fretting about the angle of a chair’s back – sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it in front of you, in context. One unexpected problem I had wasn’t a software issue – it was inspiration. You can go deeper and fiddle with details and settings, but the standard settings allow the user to focus on their design without getting stuck on joints and angle calculations. It solves many of the usual CAD issues simply by making decisions for the user. You draw your chair in profile, and the software instantly adapts it with perpendicular slats, turning your quick doodle into a digital blueprint of pieces which can be cut from a flat sheet and slotted together in a 3D form. But allow plenty more time for tinkering… SketchChair, for example, has one main function: it allows you to design a chair in 3 dimensions, and have it ready to be cut out in minutes. One way to reduce this confusion is to use a simplified, very specialized tool which can be as basic or as in-depth as the user requires. And I’m assuming you’re doing all this work without anything to sit on. Then comes prototyping, testing and adjustment. When trying to make a physical object like a chair there’s even more to think about – how much weight can your design handle? How about joining your parts together – do you know your dovetail from your dado? What materials and construction techniques will you use? Will you mill it from solid wood, or slot it together from lasercut 2D sections?Įven once you’ve designed a 3D model with all this in mind, you need to communicate this design to your fabrication machine in a way it understands – with the right settings and file formats. I’ve been using a simple free software program called SketchChair which avoids some of the usual complications of computer aided design (CAD).ģD CAD software is often expensive, and difficult for beginners – there can be quite a learning curve just to make a simple mock-up. ![]() This week I’ve been experimenting with creating my own open source chairs and there’s a little more to it than just hitting Ctrl+P. When you combine 3D software with digital fabrication equipment like CNC mills and laser cutters, you’re just a few mouse clicks and the push of a button away from your own quasi-futuristic space furniture. With today’s open design tools, it seems the future of furniture is already upon us (or are we upon it?). In the future, should we ever bore of our jetpacks and decide to come back down to earth, sit at the hovertable and eat our 3D-printed bacon and eggs, we’ll need something to sit on. ![]()
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