Upside-down Chair - Chair Design

Instructor: Ben Refuerzo ︎
Year:  2020 Spring
Individual Work

The upside-down chair is a galvanized chair with 2 directions of rods, vertical and horizontal. The main concept is to create a chair with multiple functions, which serves both adults and children with different heights. People would sit on the bent part of the vertical rods, and choose their own ways sitting on the chair. 

The chair’s profile is inspired by the shape of the sand timer as well as the loading sign on a computer screen. Both the sand timer and the chair have to be manipulated by human hands, which means people could take them up and rotate them down.

The rods have different functions when they are in two positions. The first one is when the chair standing down-way like this, here would be the stand, and here will not have an arm-rest but a huge back-rest. Then when the chair is inversed, standing up-way like this,  here would be the stand rather than the back-rest anymore, and the top horizontal rod would play the role of both back-rest and arm-rest.

So the benefit of the chair is that people could choose their preferred gestures based on the height of the chair. For example, the lady is sitting in a lower position while the man is sitting higher.   

Also, the chair provides children a comfortable low height when they are playing on the ground or a suitable high seat when they are eating.

The chair is also an animal-friendly chair which gives spaces for pets to hide and take rests.

Because the chairs are made out of steel, they could be used both inside and outside. And in terms of comfortability, the chairs are using wires rather than panels, so they won’t absorb too much heat during the summer or too much cold during the winter.