Arise Chair

I made a chair!

As part of the 10-week ME 263 class at Stanford, I designed, prototyped, and fabricated a folding chair. This chair was a system design in many ways and challenged me to sharpen my skills in several fabrication areas. In the end, I incorporated wooden joinery, upholstery, CNC milling, and metal laser cutting to create the final chair, and learned to balance function and visual language throughout.

The design process was a mixture of research, testing, and personal reflections on what I wanted my chair to be like. I studied other chair designs to understand what how their dimensions matched their feel for inspiration and picked out that I wanted to have a light, comfortable, and relatively upright chair of my own. I wanted the folding mechanism to be seamless and intuitive, so I designed it the legs to fold in and the seat to fold up. At the same time, I wanted the visuals of the folding chair to be subtle, so I hid the folding motion hard stops of the chair within the pivot between the chair legs. To make the chair more casual and comforting, I added a padded seat and back with velvet upholstery.

Initially, I struggled to get my chair to hold enough weight reliably as the simplicity of the design didn’t offer much support on the legs. I saw problems with the chair legs splaying lower over time, and saw splitting in the wood on the chair legs. By switching the grain direction on the wood to counter the direction of the force while sitting, as well as switching to more robust metal hardware within the pivot point, I was finally able to achieve the necessary strength.

After studying many chairs by famous designers, I’m proud to establish myself as an early designer with my own.