Umbrella Chair

Industrial Design, 2018

Diseño de Mobiliario: Visiones Nórdicas was a hands-on summer furniture design course at Universidad de los Andes, led by Paola Cabrera and Heikki Ruoho, built around a single deliberately narrow brief, to design an object for sitting using nothing but 6mm smooth steel rod, able to hold an adult's weight, within roughly 800×800×800mm. The approach was Nordic-Finnish, prioritizing function and accessibility over ornament and historicism, and learning entirely by making rather than by rendering.

Working in a team of three, we developed the Umbrella Chair through the course's "sketching in the air" method, bending and welding steel rod directly into three-dimensional form, testing structural ideas physically rather than on paper, and refining the design through iteration and trial and error until it held weight reliably within the material's single-gauge constraint. I also joined the three-person graphics team designing the identity and materials for "Sketching in the Air," the exhibition presenting all 25 students' resulting chairs.

The Umbrella Chair was exhibited alongside 24 other steel-rod seating designs in "Sketching in the Air: Experiments for Sitting" at Universidad de los Andes' Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño, opening July 19, 2017.