1-Minute Chair Kit Comes with Wood & Wax
Suspend your disbelief for a moment … and skip over questions about how these would hold up during a heat wave. Imagine, instead, the simplicity of creating your own piece of furniture in this way: dipping pre-cut pieces of wood into hot wax, then simply sticking joints together to make a DIY chair, table, etc… in seconds.
The point to be made here is about process, not product. The idea is like the Ikea buy-then-build approach, but taken multiple steps further in tapping into the collective desire of cultures and individuals to be creative.
When it comes to cooking and other home arts and crafts, we expect to take some joy in projects we work on personally – so why not introduce the same kind of daily access to creative potential in the realm of the furniture and furnishings we use as well?
The so-called Workshop Chair by industrial designer Jerszy Seymour is just one illustration of this larger ideal of bringing design back to the masses in a way that inverts (and subverts) our notions of mass-production. An engineer by training and installation artist in practice, this piece (alongside others in the wax-and-wood-furniture collection) mirrors the awareness-raising aspirations of rooms he has covered in chalk-board scrawls and spaces he has flooded after furnishing them.
Maybe this is still too futuristic (or artistic) a notion, though, to be applied to the current state of furniture design and production. Perhaps the first step is somewhere in the modular space between semi-constructed Ikea items and these fully-individual works – a kit-of-parts set of wooden planks and plywood boards, complete with containers of colored wax, would help introduce these ideas to a broader public in a more piecemeal manner.
About designer Jerszy Seymour:
“Jerszy Seymour is a designer working in the most expanded sense of the field. He sees design as the creation of situations, as the general relationship we have with the built world, the natural world, other people and ourselves, and as much about the inhabitation of the planet as the inhabitation of the mind. The goal is the transformation of reality guided by constant humour and a tainted sense of poetry and the idea of the NON-GESAMT GESAMTKUNSTWERK.”
