What DIY group would NOT do benches or some form of furniture right?!
OBSERVATION:
The idea came from Art Center’s ECOCOUNCIL; they wanted to have benches on the rooftop of our school (we might putting some a little everywhere). The challenge was that we had to be able to address a few needs (packaged in this worksheet)
Heidrun takes notes, Russell sketches.
I have to say it’s a very exiting perspective to get to make STUFF for your school and to think that if anyone were to STEAL them, well, hey it most likely would mean they were designed well in the first place. Anyways, getting ahead of myself.
PROCESS:
We designed them, at my place, sketches / mockups and voted on a few directions that addressed different needs.
Conclusion of the benches preliminary sketching phase
1| Small stool to be assembled by folding (felt? cardboard? rope + wood?)
2| Basic rectangular frame (no back, just seat) to then attach our own crazy shapes onto it
3| Adaptable bench made of holes and dowels (sealed MDF?)
Then we had a prototype “making day”. We met at school in the back of the Graduate Transportation room, using the schools tools, and materials funded by a school stipend we get for hosting a club we tried out our ideas…
Some converged, some were put “temporarily” on the sidelines…hehe…he.. he. At least we had one to follow with, Russell had made a version of design one and made renderings of it to approximate material cost.
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- One stool unit
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- Tessellated stools
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- Exploded view
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- Bench design
The next step was getting a prototype to exist. The prototype enabled us to further explore HOW TO PRODUCE this stool and HOW TO MAKE IT INTO A BENCH.
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- 1| Blueprints and planning
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- 2| Cut layout
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- 3| Drill press after the tablesaw
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- 4| Assembly by rope
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- 5| Test
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- 6| Tes5
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- 7| Use testing
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- 8| Future iterations
We realized two of the previous concepts would be possible to fuse to create a network of stools and benches. The next step is actually produce a few more and to see how different students use / adapt the stool to their needs. We are trying to figure out a way to either play this out in full scale or smaller…
The full-scale stool production was on hiatus for the past week due to lack of time to spend on it, however we’ve been able to instead host a small “design workshop” during our school’s “TRUNK SALE” event (which brings quite a bit of traffic) where we had students imagine what they would do if they had more of the parts the stools are made of; here are the results!
3 weeks of refinement later, we’ve produced 12. we are looking at selling some while keeping the blueprints available:
here is an overview of the process
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- rough cut the triangles and rectangles and triangles
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- add the holes on the drill press
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- run the rectangles and triangles on the table saw to make the dados and rabbets
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- angle cut the long sides of the rectangles to make them fit into a triangle
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- SEAL THEM! (to make them water proof)
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- then comes the assemble, line up all the parts
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- and figure out how to tie it all together with ONE PIECE OF ROPE
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- one option is to only tie the sides (will come in handy when making the full bench)
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- once tied up you can use hard ware or a knot, just remember to heat the tip of the rope so it doesn’t fray
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- you’ve got a stool!
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- if you want a bench, get a longer board, and drill holes matching the ones from the triangles
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- then, tie a rope between them and the two triangular tops
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- DONE
and some shots of the final pieces in use / context
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- but now i am stocking them at my house before their official release!
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- on the way home!
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- stools + N64
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- the bench must not have looked secure enough…
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- they are like little mushrooms
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- in context!
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- patterns
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- maya putting her first one together….
May 4th
Other news: we attended the Pasadena Earth and Arts Festival, lot’s of fun
Big thanks to:
Ecocouncil, Dice, Heidrun, Gustav, Jeremy, Paul, Maya, Harmonie, Fernando and everyone else!
