ARMchair 

Master ︎ Computational Design
Supervisors ︎ Alexander Fillies, Hans Sachs
Tools ︎ Grasshopper, CNC
Place ︎ Detmold, Germany
Year ︎ 2018

The goal of this task was to design a 1:1 piece of furniture for Opendesk, an online platform that provides open making designs to be downloaded and built by the consumer anywhere in the world using a CNC mill. The ARMchair concept was then created by following two of the most important guidelines from Opendesk for design for open making: universal makeability and easy assembly.

When designing a piece of furniture that could be built anywhere, it is important to consider the availability of material and form of production. Therefore, the chair would be made from birch plywood, which is a widely available material, and cut by a CNC mill, which can be found in most wood workshops worldwide.

The assembly process is also important to consider when it is the final user who may be building the furniture. An easy assembly is simple, intuitive and enjoyable. Multiple small parts, glueing or clamping parts together might be discouraging. To avoid that, the ARMchair was designed with only three different parts, the essential pieces of a chair: the leg with an integrated armrest, the seat and the backrest. The goal was to connect the pieces and make the chair stable only by using simple CNC-cut connections and the geometry of the chair itself.

As the chair was completely parametrized in Grasshopper, it was possible to easily make small changes in the geometry and connections to produce different mockups until the desired goal was achieved.