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I'm a designer in Vancouver, Canada. I work at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, am a director of the 221A Artist Run Centre, and a member of Fieldwork design collective. I'm an Emily Carr and University of Victoria graduate and have worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. I'm a cycling advocate and race on the Garneau Evolution team.

art canada design history industrial university victoria School, May 17, 2006 1:54 AM 4 comments

Shake it Middle Class 14!

First class for Design History 1, a required second-year course for all design majors at the Emily Carr Institute. I'll go over the major points our instructor covered during the three hour session and highlight those that caught my attention.

Chair #14 (1851, first to be designed for mass production), Shaker chair (late 18th C., form follows function), Belter chair (1850, fancy compound molded plywood).

The lecture was broken up into five sections:

1. Course Introduction
2. 18th C. Industrial Revolution comes 50 years early to Britain Middle class (as with every Art History course I have ever taken, regardless of the era: always ALWAYS the rise of the middle class): Afford new things, rise of commodity culture, etc.
3. Shaker movement Predecessor to Form Follows Function, or as they put it: Beauty rises out of practicality.
4. Posture / Comfort Ideological- and culture-based, not fixed. The Middle Ages forgot what chairs were. Cushions in the Middle East.
5. Victorian Decoration affordable, machines scary. Americans like machines: come here machine, be joyous and multiply.

Points of Personal Interest

These Shakers are interesting. I've always heard but never read more about them. Even when their furniture speaks of beauty in design (such as contoured, lathed chair supports) they follow a function first. "Beauty rises out of practicality" said their 18th C. leader, Mother Ann. They were also big on "A place for everything...and everything in its place." See much of their influence in today's modernism? They were doing the plain white walls when everyone had wallpaper. Drawers and storage in small spaces before IKEA was born.

Considered "the father of the modern chair," you've definitely seen Michael Thonet's Chair #14 (it was #14 in the original catalogue). The classic French cafe chair that totally survives to this day. The first chair designed for mass production from the get-go, and it packed flat for shipment. Why do I find it so pretty, and how has it lasted so long? Infatuation with French culture? A standard of elegance?

The whole concept of chair is not universal. It reminded me of my Korean friend first telling me her parents used wooden blocks as pillows, and that this was common in Korea. I've travelled a bit and seen how divergent a WC or a living room lounge can be (squat and no TP for the former, cushions on dirt for the latter), but come on, defintions of comfort--as far as sleeping on something padded--isn't cross-cultural?

So this got me thinking about chair design of course. A couple of us entering Industrial Design have bemoaned the endless examples of student chair design and the fact that we're doomed to repeat the mundane in both what we are expected to produce for an assignment and in considering chair design as integral to our chosen profession and learning process.

But thinking about the history of chair design--from the idea that judges in a medieval French court did not, in fact, ever consider skipping the whole sitting-on-the-ground-for-a three-month-trial and oh, say, support their back in a chair, to the angle of recline in a sofa embodying certain emergent trends among a culture or social group, as in the 18th C. "I am leaning back in this new chair at a greater incline that your mother's generation ever did, oh deflower me at once kind sir!)--has got me thinking about what a role chairs play in our interactions with others, with our work and with our play (back seat of a car at the drive-in, the Aeron as the dot-com bubble status, the student futon for movies and more making out).

Oh yes, and then we watched a 1980s-era video about the coke bottle design, to which our instructor will argue (next week) is a direct descedant of Victorian ideology.