For this assignment I decided to make a chair. Given that the way the Shopbot and Waterjet work, I wanted to exploit the planar dimension. I thus started drawing profiles that could be cut out of materials and aggregated to create a form.

After designing several alternatives I was planning to waterjet an aluminum frame, with several wooden spacers, and rope for the seating and to keep the two aluminum profiles together. This created the following elaboration on the Rietveld Z-chair.

Given the price of the sheets of aluminum I needed, I decided to change the design.

The second idea, which I eventually built, is a modular chair made out of one L-shaped piece that can be assembled in sequence creating chairs, benches, or tables. It seemed so easy that I believe it must already exist, yet so far I haven’t found a design that does just this.

This is the final chair so far. Given that I had no time to do a good nesting, I wasted a lot of money on a nice piece of birch wood. IMPORTANT LESSON: use nesting software to get the most out of your material: this was a waste!

For modeling  I first used acad with ergonomic people, and exported that to Rhino, to test if the concepts actually aggregate as I imagined. When I prototyped it, I did still find some glitches, such as the height, the lateral stability, and (although I personally like it) it is very straight. Adding a 10 degree angle supposedly would do the trick.