One of the most exciting installations at this year’s London Design Festival was X3 by Creative Research and Development. They challenged three designers to design and make a chair in six hours, using the tools and materials provided in the goldfish bowl of a workshop installed at Super Brands London. Here’s how they did…
Sam Weller was up first. Sam has studied typography, industrial design and most recently product design at the RCA under Sebastian Wrong, so he had a good range to draw from.
He got started at 1pm on the dot. He spent the first four hours fabricating the pieces of the chair and started joining them at 5.15pm.
He attached the back with just 15 minutes to go, and frantically putting the final wax on in the last few minutes, finished just in time.
The next day, all was set up and ready for Alex Hellum in plenty of time and he got started bang on 1pm too.
Norwegian born Alex Hellum is also an RCA graduate and he has designed for Heals, Thorsten Van Elten and Ercol. He describes his design ethos as being based on observation, utility and honest use of materials.
He seemed focused all day, despite everything going on around him, and his design requiring quite a lot of precision.
Each designer had the same tools to work with: a 240mm Japanese sawa wood mallet, a hammer, a 10mm and a 20mm chisel, a smoothing plane, a woodworking vice, four speed clamps, a square, and a tenon saw. Machine tools provided were: a router, a cordless drill, drill bits and countersink and a dust extraction vacuum.
The only one of the three to paint his chair, Alex added the red seat with minutes to go until the deadline.
He said: “I sat in my chair at four minutes past 7pm and it didn’t break! It was a really good feeling and a great experience pushing my ‘bodging’ skills to the limit.”
Jack Smith got started a sneaky 5 minutes early so he was well underway by 2pm when this photo was taken.
Also an RCA graduate, Jack did his BA at Sheffiled Hallam University and is now based in London’s Battersea with his design partner Gemma Matthias.
With 15 minutes to go and a crowd gathering, the pressure was on.
Jack finally completed his chair at 7.30pm, so slightly over the 6 hour time limit, but he finished to a round of applause from the crowd.
All the chairs were produced from a choice of the same materials: four sheets of 600mm x 600mm x 18mm birch ply wood, eight sheets of 25mm x 50mm x 1200mm prepared beech and eight of 15mm x 30mm x 1200mm, plus one litre each of blue, yellow, red, white and black water soluble paint, water, sand paper, a sanding block, wood glue, screws, pins, wood wax, rags, a paint brush, a small tub for mixing paint, duct tape and masking tape.
From an identical brief and identical tools and materials emerged three quite different chairs, each of which was auctioned on eBay to raise money for a charity called UK Youth whch helps young people to access learning opportunities including woodwork, carpentry and other hands-on design skills.
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- here’s one I made earlier :: input
- here’s one I made earlier :: elasticated chair
- here’s one I made earlier :: tekio
- here’s one I made earlier :: bright as a button
