MELD

The design of this chair has been in the works for a good 3+ years and now we’re getting down to the details. Each new step has added new details with new problems and luckily new renderings for new thrills. This is the first product to market formally using the platform design method.

It started with platform toys aka urban vinyl aka designer toys. I was first attracted to platform toys in 2002, while living in Tokyo I got wind of gajapon ガチャポン which are shops filled with small toys. These shops a found here and there around Tokyo with a concentration in Akihabara. Many of these shops also displayed and sold Be@rbrick. From then I was enamored by the basic shape and the different ways designers could express themselves with it.

I went back to these shops many times just to browse around, I bought very little. More just to look and listen and see what it was all about. Then maybe 9 months later back in Norway teaching masters degree class in Interactive design things became to clear up in my head. Many of the students were studying product design, so in many cases we did projects based on product design interactivity and interface.

At about the time I was moving to Tokyo I began discussing with the soon to be founder of Løvetann, a modular housing company. These discussions helped focus and ground the details of what this housing system should be, how it should function and most importantly how people should relate to it.

At this point the chair was well on it’s way in my head. But it wasn’t until 2006 (when I left Løvetann) that I seriously started to develop the chair concept. It was a simple idea to start with. Design a basic chair, so basic that other designers could change it’s shape, look and feel without the chair falling apart. Then show people how they can make it their own by putting it together in unique ways.

Originally I planned on designing a platform toy first, but it soon became clear that a chair was more substantial and interesting, so the toys will have to wait…

When working at Løvetann and during the start of the chair design development, I thought I was brilliant, that I had come up with this new concept for customization… It was a long was down form there on. Over the next 2 years I would learn that chair cut from single sheet of wood have been done many, many times. On top of that, mass customization has been a key subject (even the focus of a department) at Harvard since I was a teenager in the mid 80’s. There were more grey bearded pipe smoking professors and business consultants doing mass customization than all the people I’ve ever met in my life. The first times this happened, it was depressing, but I don’t mind anymore.

No product (to my knowledge) has approached design and mass customization from this point of view. Until now.