A Sitting Renaissance by Madhu Priyanka Kannabiran

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

New perspectives to Chair design

Sitting Renaissance

Preface The Degree Project is the last project that a student of the National Institute of Design takes up, after VII semesters of academic instruction. A typical Degree Project lasts between four to six months, during which a student goes through an entire design process from start to end, often in an Industry scenario. Sometimes, students may also choose to define their own project brief and pursue projects independently, instead of working with a studio or a corporate. This project is an exploration of alternatively defining design itself. It seeks to look into and understand the possibilities of changing the market reality of consumption and challenges the ideas of traditional furniture design. The outcomes of this project seek to open up possibilities of looking at what we define as furniture design. The challenges of a Self-sponsored Degree Project are many and they all help one understand oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strengths and weaknesses and train one to take command of situations and make responsible decisions. The experience also kindles an entrepreneurial spirit in the student and gives one enough confidence to face design challenges in the future, even singlehandedly and in collaboration with others.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Contents 1. Acknowledgments........................................................................................................... 2. Authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note................................................................................................................... 3. Introduction...................................................................................................................... 4.Critical Design................................................................................................................... Superflux........................................................................................................................... Critical Design in the Indian context................................................................................... Souvenirs from the future.................................................................................................. Why Critical Design for this project?..................................................................................

6 8 10 12 16 18 19 21

Phases 1,2 5.The Current SITuation........................................................................................................ The Ergonomic Controversy in Chair Design.................................................................. The Sitting Body.............................................................................................................. The glorious spine and what happens to it when we sit.................................................. 6.LOOKING BACK:................................................................................................................ The Past of Human Sitting............................................................................................... 7.LOOKING AROUND:........................................................................................................... Sitting culture around the world....................................................................................... 8.FROM SITTING TO SITTING ON CHAIRS:......................................................................... A brief history of chairs.................................................................................................... 9.The present prevalence of chairs..................................................................................... The cultural implications of peoples around the world moving to a chair based lifestyle 10. How to defeat a chair?....................................................................................................

26 28 32 33 41 42 45 48 58 66

Phase 3 11. Addressing the conundrum of chairs............................................................................. Designing for the transition............................................................................................. Chair Design Checklist................................................................................................... 12. Critical narrative: Generating speculative contexts......................................................... Targets of Critical Objects............................................................................................... Diegetic Prototypes......................................................................................................... Aesthetics of Unreality..................................................................................................... 13. The final outcome Version1.......................................................................................................................... Version2......................................................................................................................... The Critical Objects......................................................................................................... 14. Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 15. Personal Insights............................................................................................................. 16. Credits............................................................................................................................. 17. Bibliography..................................................................................................................... 18. Annexure.........................................................................................................................

70 80 91 92 96 97 98 99 104 110 132 133 147 140 143

Acknowledgments I’d like to express my gratitude to those without whose presence I would not have been able to realise this project. This project would not have occurred if not for Prof. Rama Rao, who gave me the freedom to explore this topic as I wanted, during my Systems Design project. His open-mindedness and relentless motivation and clarity in times of doubt made a significant difference in how I took this project forward. If my guide, Praveen Nahar hadn’t motivated me to take my Systems Design Project further initially, this project would not have happened. It took him just a few minutes to inspire me to turn-down the projects that I had secured during Placements and see potential in my own work. My mentor Pravinsinh Solanki for giving the right kind of practical advice at all times and being extremely supportive during times of difficulty. He has always encouraged me to raise my bar and chase bigger dreams. Prof. Mann Singh for spending time with me, listening to me and showing me directions to take when I was lost. Prof L C Ujjawane for being kind enough to encourage my doubts whenever I went to him for help Prof Galen Cranz for writing The Chair and pushing me to look at my field critically. I cannot owe my parents enough for supporting me through the project even as I faced some unexpected challenges. They have been concerned sponsors and a questioning audience, following up on my work regularly and helping me stay on track and not slack-off. My brother, for taking full responsibility of my emotional damage control through the course of the project. He was the one I turned to at every instance of breakdown and he never failed to clear the clouds for me. His mature insights on the project itself left deep impacts on the way I saw things through. My friends without whom I would not have survived the past few months, literally. Although they weren’t able to be right next to me throughout, they extended interest, insights and encouragement from across distances through the whole project. I cannot thank them enough. I’m grateful for having made so many great friends. Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Ajitesh Lokhande, the person who had as much involvement in the project as I and was always as source of stimulating design conversations and much more. Saksham Arora, for being on the other end of the phone and listening to my panic and cry at 5AM and making me calm down after that. Sambit Kumar Pradhan, for being so curious about every step in the project and being a source of constant motivation and encouragement to GO GET IT! He was so sincerely involved that he left a comment on each of my blog posts, despite his busy schedule. Arunatpal Chanda, his fascination for the work I was doing and timely and meaningful interjections helped me sort out a lot of challenges that I could have never done on my own. Shruthy Balaji, the elder sister who took care of me like a child and offered clarity in times of delusion. Dhivyesh Venkat, although he often made me uncomfortable by lionizing me, he never failed to be critical when it was needed. Although much younger than myself, the depth of his thinking sometimes surpassed mine. Anupam Krishna, my little brother, always there to cheer me up and lend a helping hand at the drop of a hat. A major portion of his involvement included checking up if I was alive and sharing memes to keep me entertained through the vacations when I had stayed back on campus to work. Lakshmi Pradha and Abinaya for always lightening my mood and brightening my days. Mudita Agarwal and Andreas Marshal Rozario for wrapping me up in a cocoon of love and care. Jyotirmayee Bommana who I had barely known for a few hours before she was ready to dive with me into the depths of my project and look for answers. She gave me hope that the world canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be so bad when I was faced with the most difficult of times. Kush Kalia for helping me readily, every time. These and all others who have made small and significant contributions towards bringing this project this far. Some of them, Shail Thappa, Rohan Sharma, Ekta Bharti, Vishwanath Pasumarthi, Uttishta Varanasi, Shruti Bumb, Nivida Malhotra, Gyan Rc, Vishnu Aravind, Nikita Arora, Indrayudh Sengupta, Shipra Balasubramani, Harshali Paralikar, Niyati Rao, Aarushi Bapna, Kush Kalia, Arjit Malviya, Pallavi Mambillil, Prajjwal Chandra, Dhyani Parekh, Nuti Mody, Shantanu Kharkare, Aaditya Waagh, Anushree Joshi, Chingrimi, Pournima Shinde, Shubhankar Rai Gupta, Sneha Arvind, Milan Manoj, Somanshu Kumar. 7

Author’s Note I understand that if you dare to question one thing, you must be prepared to question everything, including yourself. I started off with questioning the idea of chairs and in the past ten months, there are few things I haven’t questioned or been critical of. For a major portion, this project itself has been a build-up of questions digging deeper and wider. The answers themselves, came much later. I don’t believe that these are The Answers. These are just what I, as an individual, with my limited yet unique experiences and interactions have been able to formulate. I believe the more minds that get involved in this conversation, a better variety of perspectives will emerge and relevant changes can be brought about. I must confess that taking up this project has altered me as a person. I am as skeptical as I was naive before. For reasons I haven’t been able to uncover yet, I’ve been incapable of having strong opinions about anything. In my first year at college I had felt certain pressure to discern the ‘right’ from the ‘wrong’ to keep from transgressing. I pretty much saw the world in black and white. But somewhere down the line, the black and white merged and painting most of my vision in shades of grey. I relate with the character Greg Gaines from the 2012 novel, ‘Me and Earl and the dying girl’. I never do or say anything that would identify me as a member of a group and thus exclude me from another. I participate as passively as a participant can, in social, cultural and political movements. I rarely have strong opinions of my own and even if I do, I make no serious efforts to make them public. In fact, I have forever refrained from writing, convinced that I don’t have anything important enough to share with the world. I realized my folly when I went on exchange to Europe where I saw many of my classmates diligently maintaining blogs or websites which they kept updated with even minor projects. And that’s how they got the recognition they did. Till then I had only been jealous of the privilege of being designers of the first world. I understood that it didn’t come effortlessly. Professor M P Ranjan’s words “publish or perish” became suddenly more meaningful. I didn’t start writing the moment I got home as one might have expected, seeing the deep impact my exchange experience left on me. I still didn’t have anything exciting or worth writing about, until this project came along. I had finally found something powerful enough for me to 1) have a strong opinion

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

about 2) share my opinion with others 3) write about. I haven’t entirely been able to express myself with complete seriousness. That’s why most of my pieces are accompanied by illustrations, predominantly comical. At one point during the project, I realized that I was taking myself too seriously. When people, even my fellow classmates and friends did not share the same passion as I had for the topic, I got offended and felt let-down. That’s when it struck me that there are several, far more serious causes that have failed to move these people, why, even me because responding to those causes involve tolerating a little more ‘inconvenience’ in our lives. I really had no right to complain. That’s when I decided to arm myself with humour and satire rather than anger and accusations. I do not claim that I’m skilled at wielding these tools, but I have tried. Just as you can’t limit your questioning to one area of life, you can’t have a message to get out and expect change, if you’re not willing to acknowledge others’ messages and make the changes they suggest. In the past few months, I have turned vegetarian, a more mindful consumer, stopped consuming soft drinks, regularly refuse straws and have become interested in Marxist communism.

Introduction Human beings have been making and using chairs for some 5000 years now. Chairs have become ingrained entities in most cultures around the world. They are indispensable parts of our lives, they’re everywhere and accessible to everyone. Every industrial designer at some point in her/his life designs or thinks about designing a chair. Functionally, it’s rather simple, an elevated surface to rest the human posterior on. But it has, over time, evolved to become a powerful icon, a dynamic symbol representing a number of things between religious leaders and capital punishment (God and death, alternatively). It’s a representation of civilized dignity, modernization, westernisation, and in general, a prosperous, progressive society. For many years now, autonomous sitting has been looked down upon and accused of being animal-like. We are in a time where we’ve started realising the adverse effects of deviating from our natural, primal behaviours and habits. We’ve altered our original diets, somatic cycles, bodily activity, and the way we communicate, so much and so quickly that evolution hasn’t caught up and things are beginning to backfire at us. Some such instances include the contradiction between our secure dairy industries and 65% of the world population still being Lactose intolerant and the existence of phenomena like “ Facebook Depression”. Chairs too are an evidence of such a deviation. It’s a fact that the human body is not designed to be static but to be constantly engaged in movement and activity. The only natural position of extended rest is lying down. The reality, that we have a tool to help us remain static without feeling discomfort for longer and longer durations, and there’s a whole industry built on this, is one worth some critical investigation. As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t possible for me to limit my critical ways of thinking to just one topic. What started as a project questioning chairs has branched out in several directions at its peak, questions the definition of design itself. Since this wasn’t an industry sponsored project, I had no clients to please or revenues to generate. So I took the chance to academically explore design alternative. This project falls under the category of “Critical Design” a dimension of design that’s been gaining steady popularity in the past 20 years. This document is a record of the findings of my investigation, the way I have processed these findings as an insider, being a furniture designer and my visions for alternative futures for Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

mankind in this respect. The reader is requested to patiently read through these articulations of the conversations, thoughts and insights that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had in the past ten months of drowning in this topic. You will be rewarded with an occasional visual summary of the written content.

Critical Design

img.:List made by Dunne and Raby and published in their book Speculative Everything

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

The term critical design was first used by Professor Anthony Dunne in 1990. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are pioneers in the field. Critical design is an extended dimension of design, in my understanding. Below is a comparative table created by Dunne and Raby between conventional design and critical design. They do not claim that critical design is an alternative method of design but possibly an additional set of attributes.

A diagram to help explain the domain of critical design work is given by Dunne and Raby. I thus explain the diagram based on my own understanding.

Most design is for the future. Designers work around predictions of technological advancements, socio-wcultural dynamism, economic trends, environmental limitations and even political probabilities. It makes sense to look out for the future when designing to be relevant. But in this method of designing, a designer remains a passive participant, directed by what seem to be the uncontrollable forces of probabilities. Dunne and Raby seem to recommend that designers should harness their creativity to not just design for the probable future but imagine plausible, even possible futures themselves. These imagined possibilities are to be communicated to the citizens of this planet through the medium of design. To get across a message through design, the design objects themselves cannot be normal, everyday objects. Then they will get assimilated without question like the thousand other objects that are made every day. They have to be strange, weird and curious but not too weird that theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d get displayed only in museums to be critiqued and appreciated as art, detached from everyday life. The objects should be possible to fit in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s living scenarios so as to spark discussions and debates about the implied future. Such discussions will lead to 13

the active participation of citizen-consumers in choosing and building desirable futures for that particular group of people, be it an organisation, a city, a nation. In their own words “Designers should not define futures for everyone else but working with experts including ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussions about the kind of futures that people really want. Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation.” Here, I explain two of my most favourite critical/ speculative design projects to give the reader more clarity. Belief systems (2009), Bernd Hopfengaertner

Watch the film img.:Shopping experience and micro-expression controlling practice

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Hopfengaertner speculates what would happen if the tech industry’s dream of making machines capable of reading humans came true and public. A combination of algorithms and cameras that can read emotions, gait and demeanour, neurotechnologies that can’t read thoughts exactly but and make accurate guesses of what they’re thinking. He imagines a possible shopping experience of that time. A person walks up to a kiosk with the intention of purchasing a teapot. She pays and thousands of images of different teapots flash in front of her eyes, in quick succession. At one point the monitor freezes and the teapot on the screen is automatically vended. The machine has decided which one she wants by reading her micro expressions. He goes further and imagines how humans would counter this infringement of their mental privacy. He thinks people might then train to control their facial muscles so as not to give away their thoughts through their expressions. Paradoxically, they’d have to act less human so as to feel more human.

I wanna deliver a Shark(2012), Ai Hasegawa This project imagines an option for women approaching middle-age who are impulsively triggered to want to give birth but for many reasons donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to have a child. Hasegawa imagines a possibility where such a woman chooses to use her reproductive ability to help sustain endangered species of animals. After much research and consultation, Hasegawa discovered that though this might not work out for her favourite options to gestate, dolphin or tuna, it would be technically possible with one of the smaller sharks and give birth to it. This might sound absurd at the surface but it manages to raise interesting discussions about the reproductive power of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body and aided by developments in biomedicine, the possibility of using this power to help other species of animals instead of add more to our own ever increasing population.

Watch the film

img.:Giving a water-birth to a dolphin, Anatomical model for the concept

Superflux Founded by Anab Jain, an alumnus of NID and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Anglo-Indian studio’s early work brought speculative design approaches to new audiences, working for some of the world’s biggest like Microsoft Research, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, and exhibiting work at MoMA New York, the National Museum of China, and the V&A in London. Over the years, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and acting.

The Ministry of Energy and the Prime Minister’s Office invited Superflux to help them to not only develop a mechanism to experience numerous possible futures around energy, but more importantly, to stress test the opportunities and broader systemic consequences of each future with Cabinet Ministers and key decision makers. The ambition was that such collaborative futuring activity would help inform the country’s energy policy all the way till 2050. Among other outcomes, they also developed a range of artefacts to give an experiential glimpse into these potential worlds. These were not objects of prophecy, but of potential: Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

their role was to embody the challenges and opportunities which might be encountered on each particular developmental path, and to express something of the material lived reality which the policies might create. For instance in a future where there is no incentive to change behaviour or policy, but instead continue along the route of burning fossil fuels, one of the big consequences would be the horrific air pollution that the Emiratis would (if not already) experience in their cities. Hence they decided to give them a flavour of what it would feel like to breathe the air from that future. Superflux created a series of air samples from the years 2020, 2028, and 2034 containing the most likely combination of PM10,PM2.5, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone, based on climate and fossil fuel emission projections. It was noxious stuff, impossible to inhale even a small amount. Such experiential evidence drove home the point that often predictions and data can’t. This work created immediate, actionable insights toward the goal of achieving the UAE’s National Energy Strategy 2050, which was announced soon after. As part of this strategy, the government will be investing $163 billion in renewables, with the ambition of moving UAE towards a more sustainable future. Watch Anab’s TED talk

Critical Design in the Indian context Although these kind of design ventures might be viewed as a bit of an indulgence in a third world country, India is a paradox. We have people dying in famines but we also have one of the world’s most advanced and competent space agencies. We’ve had a tumultuous past but we also have visions of a bright future. We have not chosen to prioritise space research over poverty alleviation. We are just a country that is working in both domains although they are ironically contradictory reflections of our reality. Critical and speculative design in the Indian context is relevant, to open up possibilities of several futures so that we can consciously move towards certain desirable futures. Designers have to be involved in solving the problems of the day, but such exercises could help foresee problems of the future. The National Design Policy talks about “Global positioning and branding of Indian designs and making “Designed in India” a by-word for quality and utility in conjunction with “Made in India” and “Served in India”.” Yet, not all design is ‘made’ or is a service. Shouldn’t we broaden these mottos and address the facet of design that is ‘Conceived in India’? We need a vision of India being a thought leader in the design domain.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Souvenirs from the future Workshop with Paolo Cardini Paolo Cardini is an Italian designer and faculty of Product design at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has an expertise in speculative design and is working on a project called Souvenirs from the future, as part of which, he travels to developing countries, conducts workshops for students guiding them to imagine unique futures for their country and culture without being influenced by western stereotypes. And then to communicate this future to the public, the students pick an object that would exist in the context of that future and prototype it. Such objects that reflect the future and act as tools for provoking discussions are called diegetic objects. His most popular project is explained in a TED talk titled “Forget Multitasking, try Monotasking”. He asks ”How efficient is Multitasking? Let’s consider for a while the option of Monotask. Someone define multitasking as an act of procrastination which allow us to lie on the surface of the problems. Athers tell us the story about super Taskers, who are the only 2% percent of the world population able to really control multiple activities at the same time...but what about of the rest of us, what about our daily lives? When’s the last time you digit a number without asking your phone? When’s the last time you enjoined just the voice of your friends? And more...when’s the last time you felt the sense of adventure of being lost in a foreign city? Here we are the Mono task project is a series of front covers to downgrade your hyper super smartphones into the essence of their functions. The files of each cover are available for free to be downloaded and 3d printed on Thingiverse.com.

Watch the TED talk

img.:3D printed monotasking phone covers

In my understanding, it is acceptable to exaggerate the characteristics of the future so that the actions they provoke now are serious and impactful enough to avoid or achieve the respective possibilities.

img.:A page from the book. The ‘A’ sounds in English.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

My team imagined the continuation of the increasing noise pollution trends in India. In India a popular way of expression is being loud. Our news channels, wedding celebrations, public religious festivities, our roads are all well known for being excessively loud. We found the cause and effect relationship between individuals’ loudness and the environmental noise. How we’re forced to speak louder when the background is noisy and consequently contribute to the increase of the effective noise level. Could this reach a situation reach a point in the future when people don’t trust spoken language for communication because it would lead to constant misunderstanding? Would everybody learn lip reading to cope up? Could a good command over lip reading be a criteria when seeking a government job? Could there be national level competitive exams in lip reading? Could lip reading be a compulsory subject introduced to children right from primary school onwards? That being the direction of questioning, we made a Primer in lip reading, issued by the NCERT.

Why Critical Design for this project? This project didn’t start off as a critical design project. Initially, I was looking for sponsors to fund me and I was looking to make consumable product alternatives/solutions for the Sitting conundrum. Fortunately or unfortunately, this year the Ford Foundation Fund has been put on hold and a lot of my time was spent on writing proposals to others in hopes of collaboration. At one point I decided to stop looking there and rather focus on the project itself. Around this time I happened to be reading Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s “Speculative Everything”, first recommended to me by Parveen Nahar. Coincidentally, Paolo Cardini’s workshop happened at the same time. In the next few weeks I decided that Critical design is the way to go for this project, for the following reasons: 1)I had no clients to please nor employers to earn a profit for. I was on my own and there was no compulsion for me to make a profitable product for the market. 2)The range of issues that the project wanted to address could not have been done by making another product, but by evoking change at an ideological level 3)Communicating through products seemed like an ideal middle-path for an industrial designer who wants to send a message rather than sell a product.

img.:comic by TALLY THE SHORT

Through the course of the project, I curated comics, illustrations and memes that reflect the essence of the project. I have included them in this document at appropriate junctions.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

“Chairs maybe built for people but people are not built for chairs” -My thought

This document is a record of three processes or phases that overlapped in occurrence, but have been presented somewhat distinctly for the reader’s convenience. Phase 1 and Phase 2 are have been fragmented and clubbed in a case-response format. Phase 1: Assembling Actuality The initial reading and gathering of information about the existing reality, the historical build up to the present, critical perspectives and upcoming alternatives. Phase 2: Mental mastication This is how I processed the information and responded to it, often with questions. This is an amalgamation of my own responses with the opinions and perspectives that came up during my discussions with peers, teachers, experts and everybody else. Phase 3: Critical provocation

artifacts

for

thought

Some solutions and alternative ways to look at the current reality and diagetic prototypes that communicate those ideas.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Phases 1,2

The current SITuation Any extended sitting — such as behind a desk at work or behind the wheel — can be harmful. What’s more, spending a few hours a week at the gym or otherwise engaged in moderate or vigorous activity doesn’t seem to significantly offset the risk.

www.businessinsider.com

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

There is a popular slogan going around in the health industry, ‘Sitting is the new smoking’. A quick Google search of ‘Sitting Disease’ would pull up thousands of articles with titles of varying intensity from “Killer Chairs: How Desk Jobs Ruin Your Health” on the Scientific American to “Sitting disease is killing us - and exercise doesn’t help” on the Telegraph.

Here are some facts and statistics found in several studies across the globe: Although a lot of articles and papers were referred to, I have selected the most hard-hitting facts from various studies and compiled them here. An elaborate list of references is given at the end of this document. Sedentary pursuits are undertaken in numerous domains of life, including recreation (eg, TV or video viewing, computer use, reading), occupation (eg, sitting at a desk or a counter), transportation (eg, sitting in a bus, car, or train), and as part of social activities (eg, playing cards, sit-down meals). Prolonged sitting time lowers energy expenditure and displaces time spent in light physical activities, which consequently leads to weight gain and obesity over time. Strong positive associations with sedentary behavior were evident for colon cancer and endometrial cancer, tumors that are considered obesity related. The majority of prospective studies of screen time and sitting time has shown that greater sedentary time is associated with an increased risk of fatal and non-fatal CVD Regularly sitting for long periods leads to poor circulation in your legs. When you sit your veins must work harder to move blood to your heart. This can lead to swelling in your ankles, varicose veins, and even blood clots, also known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT)

www.daimanuel.com

www.theguardian.com

www.qz.com

It is clear that people are sitting too much and it is seriously unhealthy for them. This fact has been known and publicised now for long enough that there a number of recommendations from experts in Yoga, Alexander Technique, Gokhale method, Movement training and large variety of products including sit stand chairs, kneeling stools, even treadmill workstations. But somehow big players like Herman Miller, Steelcase and Knoll are still making chairs only with claims of increased flexibility, added adjustability and improved ‘ergonomics’. The question is, if the problem is that people are spending too much time on chairs, how is making another chair going to solve anything? And a chair that claims to help you sit longer, ‘comfortably’ at that.

The Ergonomic Controversy in Chair Design Making ergonomically fascinating chairs is like suppressing a symptom (pain) and claiming to have cured the disease (prolonged sitting)

-My thought

Ergonomics as a field of research and innovation has its origins in the World War II fighter plane cockpit design. After the war it was relevant in factories and production industries. Now it’s of consideration in office workspaces. It is the study of the relation between humans and their immediate work environment. Chairs are an indispensable part of most immediate work surrounding so a lot of ergonomic research goes into giving the best ergonomic suggestions for chair design. Ergonomics’ primary goal is to maximise the efficiency of the human brain and body while performing a certain job and reduce errors. This is addressed by enhancing certain desirable human values at work and increasing safety, comfort and decreasing fatigue and stress of the individual. In the domain of chair design, the goals of ergonomics don’t overlap with what’s probably better for the body in the long run. If ergonomic recommendations for chairs are to make them the most comfortable for the user, implying that they won’t feel uneasy for as long as they sit on it. This means that they get no cue from the body that it’s been too long since they sat down. Making ergonomically fascinating chairs is like suppressing a symptom and claiming to have cured the disease. ‘Comfortable’ chairs are sedatives in several senses. Jump to page 47 for visual

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

I read the design story behind Herman Miller’s best rated ‘Embody chair’ with a degree of scepticism. Although I am convinced that their research is elaborate and the consequent design decisions are sufficiently justified. Yet, I think they might have looked in the wrong place to start with. I read some reviews to understand what’s so good about it. Here are some actual statements that made me cringe and the exact reason I think we need to break every stereotype about chair design and start from scratch.

“When I returned to sit in the Embody, I realized the chair was spoiling me.” “You’d never figure out what these knobs and levers do on your own, but a printed card that comes with the chair explains it concisely, and we had our chair “up-and-running” in a matter of seconds.”

-Rain Noe, writer and industrial designer for Core77

“As anyone who’s worked in an office would know, Herman Miller’s Aeron is the chair to have at your desk for both comfort and status.”

-Jason Chen for Gizmodo

“My thinking went, if I was going to be doing 7 or 8 hours in front of a computer on a regular basis, I could at least be comfortable.”

-KIF LESWING for Business Insider

These statements are expressions of our unhealthy relationship with chairs. We have become so dependent on them that we let them dictate how we use our bodies. We have attached meanings to them that are far from defining how well chairs function. We have passively accepted defeat to the system and are inventing methods to cope up with a flawed system. A critical designer doesn’t passively comply with paradigms.

Excerpt from blog:

Mad as a hatter, Sorry as a sitter The Sorry Tea Party There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Sitter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and then talking over its head. `Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,’ thought Alice; `only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.’ The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: `No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming. `There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she plopped herself in a large arm-chair at one end of the table. ‘Your chair wants sitting,’ said the Sitter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech. The dormouse shot a disgusted look in her direction. Alice straightened up and assumed a more ladylike posture as her mother had taught her. He slouched over the table. ‘Perhaps there is an invisible beast perched on his shoulder’ Alice thought to herself. “Pass me the sugar, will you please?” the sitter asked. He barely made effort to move. Alice pushed the sugar jar within his arm’s reach. The dormouse scurried over and moved it right next to his tea cup. “The sitter wouldn’t move unless there’s a bloodthirsty Bandersnatch on his trail.” she whispered to Alice. “I have my ailments to blame for that!” Alice noticed how pale the Sitter was, almost blue, like he couldn’t get enough air to breathe. His teaspoon slipped and fell to the ground. He bent down to pick it. Alice heard the nastiest crack she’d ever heard and then the sitter’s cry of agony. “It’s his back again!” exclaimed the March hare. “It’s not my back, it’s the way it cracks! It’s getting crackier by the day!’ ‘You can’t go on much longer like this, if only you wouldn’t sit all the time like this” said the concerned Dormouse as she helped him up. “That’s unthinkable! My profession demands it, I could never give it up!” The March Hare and the Dormouse shook their heads sorrily and they all went back to their chairs, sipped tea and spoke about Ravens and writing desks. Occupational Health Hazards19th Century Vs 21st Century Hat makers of the 19th century toiled in dark and dingy workshops making fine hats for the fine heads of industrial Europe. Among the numerous arduous stages of processing that went into making a felt, one was the infamous ‘carroting’. This was the process of removing hair from the skin of small animals. In the good times, hatters used camel urine to treat the fur. Camel urine wasn’t the most accessible kind in most of Europe. So it wasn’t uncommon for hatters to aspire to be self-dependent and use their own urine. Until, one young gentleman who shall be called ‘George’ belonging to the *Name Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

removed* Hatting Company contracted syphilis. His treatment included dosages of Mercuric chloride. Strangely enough, out of no coincidence, the gentleman started producing finer felt than anyone else in the workforce, earning not just the supervisor’s kudos but his coworkers’ envy. Of course, some vile ones sought to get their hands on the Syphilis meds. Meanwhile news spread of George’s potent Mercury-laden urine and scientists got their heads cracking on the chemicals. Soon enough, all of Europe’s hatters were Carroting their fur with Mercuric nitrate. The effects of Mercury poisoning may have been presented in a rather zanily appealing fashion by Lewis Carroll, through The Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Convincingly portrayed by Jhonny Depp in the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland, The Hatter with his peculiar idiosyncrasies is actually a victim of an Occupational Health Hazard. Fortunately, not long from then, reforms were made and by the 1940s Mercury usage was ended. I introduce another character who is also a victim of an Occupational Health Hazard. The Sorry Sitter. His job doesn’t have anything to do with sitting but is all about him sitting, in one place, in one manner every workday, for several hours. The Sorry Sitter is dressed immaculately. He is in a perpetually slouched state. His breath is shallow and in his eyes if you look for it you will find depression lurking. He frets. He frets about the creases on his immaculate clothes. He cannot stand them. His slow, sloth-like mannerisms reflect nothing of his agile, sprightly childhood self. When he moves too quickly or suddenly, his back makes awful cracking noises which are ensued by his own cry of pain.

img.:‘Perhaps there is an invisible beast perched on his shoulder’

The Sitting Body Researchers have tried to understand the structure of the body, speculating if it is a tension structure or a compression structure or a combination of both, some argue that it is a ‘tensegriy’ structure- a term used by Buckminster Fuller to describe structural systems that combine elements of compression and tension. Plausibly, our body’s system of cantilevers and counterbalanced forces, like Fuller’s Geodesic dome, requires gravity to create upright volume. Another relevant fact is that mechanical stability is not built-in with the structure of the body. It is a dynamic system that cannot find stasis, so somatic practitioners reject the idea that we can find any point of complete rest, apart from lying down. Since we understand ‘sitting’ as a resting posture, it means everything to know that there is no best way for the body to sit. All its parts have to be worked and rested optimally in turns. That is why we fidget so much when we sit on chairs for more than a few minutes. This is also why no chair can ever be comfortable for more than a few minutes together, says Galen Cranz. img.:An eternal postural loop on chairs

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

An eternal postural loop of sitting on chairs has been identified by an unknown source. “When a person leans back into the chair-back, it initiates both a backward and a downward force. This downwards force pushes the bottom of the pelvis forward. Eventually the sitter finds himself sitting on his tail-bone out at the edge with the spine as a whole transformed into a C-shaped slouch. This C-Slump is uncomfortable in several ways- congestion in the lungs, guts; ribs fold down over the diaphragm toward the belly; strain is created in the lower back. In order to relieve themselves from this pain, people perch at the edge of the seat without a back support. In short order they find this position tiring and scoot all the way back of the seat to take advantage of the chair-back.”

The glorious spine and what happens to it when we sit In the process of evolution of life on earth the occurrence of the backbone is considered a milestone, leading to the classification of species as ‘vertebrates’ and ‘invertebrates’. This evolution is the shift of the spine from a horizontal to vertical position, leading to up to the Homo-erectus, or the upright man. The major evolutionary advancement of man over the rest of the animal world began with his assumption of the erect posture. The ape, whose erect position is not nearly as well developed, is said to be our nearest ancestor. When man ceased using the forelimbs for locomotion, i.e. for walking or running, these became upper limbs or arms. He started lifting his food with the hands and taking it to the mouth. As a consequence he no longer needed to take his mouth near his prey or food, to pick his morsel. Nor did his jaw have to tear so forcibly. Hence the form of his teeth and jaw changed. He could now produce more delicate and diverse types of sound with the mouth and thus language began to evolve, crossing a second major evolutionary barrier it performs a number of essential functions in the human body. These functions include structure and support, movement, and protection of vital nerves and organs. Structurally, the spine is the most important component of the human body. The vertebrae that make up this structure, along with a variety of muscles and ligaments is the section of the body that allows humans to remain in an upright position while sitting or standing. A person’s backbone also provides a strong base and connection to the shoulders and pelvic girdle. Protecting the spinal cord is probably one of the more well-known functions of the backbone. Intervertebral discs lie between each individual vertebra. These discs are made up of cartilage, and the inside is made up of a soft, jelly-like substance. These discs serve to absorb much of a person’s daily activities such as walking. The spine is made up of 24 small bones (vertebrae) that are stacked on top of each other to create the spinal column. Between each vertebra is a soft, gel-like cushion called a disc that helps absorb pressure and keeps the bones from rubbing against each other. Each vertebra is held to the others by groups of ligaments. Ligaments connect bones to bones; tendons connect muscles to bones. There are also tendons that fasten muscles to the vertebrae. The spinal column also has real joints (just like the knee or elbow or any other joints) called facet joints. The facet joints link the vertebrae together and give them the flexibility to move against each other.

img.:The human spine

img.:The human spine while standing vs. sitting

The physical importance of the spine is evident. The backbone is hence used as a metaphor of fundamental support. Many cultures attach spiritual significance and metaphors to the spine. The science of yoga which has its origins in pre-Vedic India glorifies the spine as ‘Meru Dhanda’, interpreted as the axis of the universe. Different sections of the spine are associated as energy regions of different chakras. Some yogis claim that manipulating the spine specifically, will change the way a person’s brain and mind function. Such a metaphor attached to posture is what lead to the first chair with a backrest in ancient Egypt. BUT, there is 30% more pressure on the spine while sitting than while standing. Sitting on chairs at 90 degrees, pulls the tailbone and distorts lordosis, the natural bi-curved state of the spine. Neck and back problems, headaches, arthritis, poor circulation, muscle aches, indigestion, constipation, joint stiffness, fatigue, neurological problems can all be caused or worsened by poor posture.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that chairs are sedatives. They literally dull one down mentally and physically. In fact, the word sedate originates from ‘sedere’ which means ‘to sit’. Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Constantly using a backrest makes the body dependent on it over time, to retain a healthy posture, by weakening the back muscles.

An Australian doctor, Colin J Alexander, reports that varicose veins are common in chair sitting cultures, Conversely they are uncommon in cultures where people sit on the floor. The chair-sitting posture holds the sitter in a static right angle between the foot and the leg. That angle opens the Saphenous vein in the ankle to its maximum, subjecting its walls to constant pressure, so that they lose their elasticity. After years of sitting in school in that posture, the vein is permanently dilated. Later, an adult who works for hours on his feet or experiences pregnancy may need that elasticity. When not available, the walls of the veins rupture.1

Most seated tasks involve leaning forward to use the table. The weakened back muscles do no help in maintaining healthy posture while doing so.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s difficult to hold oneself upright because the muscles in the front of the body have become overshortened from slouching and over-lengthened in the back. Making the body more erect actually stretches already short muscles in the front. This causes a lessening of breathing volume. We intuitively switch from that and return to the slouch.2

The Chair, Galen Cranz 2 www.breathing.com

img.:A comic about the Human Body

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

So Far: 1) We’ve tried to understand the design of the Human Body 2) We’ve seen what happens to our body when we sit on chairs 3) We’ve realised that, yet, ergonomic research is suspiciously favourable for chair-design. 4) We’ve understood that our relationship has nearly reached a dangerous zone of complete-dependence

img.: comic by Anton Gudim

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

LOOKING BACK: The Past of Human Sitting Our most distant ancestors in the hominid species are the great apes like gorillas, chimpanzees. Observing how they rest has given us the direction for assumption of how the early humans, the homo habilis, the homo eructus and the homo Neanderthals might have sat. More dynamic postures evolved to facilitate the use of tools and implements for specific tasks. Tracing that path to primitive cultures across the world doesn’t show a drastic difference in the way people sit and function at floor level.

“A fourth of mankind habitually squats in a fashion very similar to the squatting position of the chimpanzee, and the rest of us might squat this way too if we were not trained to use other postures beyond infancy” -Gordon Hewes, Anthropologist

img.:1 Seated Gorilla;2 Seated Chimpnzee;3 Homo habilis; 4 Homo erectus; 5 Homo Neandrethal; 5000BC, Homo sapien toys from Romania 3

LOOKING AROUND: Sitting culture around the world A linear view gives details of how chairs came into being and how posture adapted to that and vice versa. A broader way of looking at things will give us details about postural behavior of people across cultures unique to those cultures, that might have originated due socio-cultural practices of that region. People’s social circumstances, clothing styles, and the places where they sat naturally brought about their manners of sitting. American anthropologist Gordon Hewes emphasised that postural variations are culturally, not anatomically determined. Sitting, like other postures, is regulated all around the world according to gender, age, social status. A brief study of sitting and seating in some non-western cultures. Japan

img.:A Karateka sits in seiza; seiza stool

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Seiza literally means ‘proper sitting’ in Japanese. Through the early history of Japan, various ways of sitting were regarded as ‘proper’, such as sitting cross-legged, sitting with one knee raised, or sitting to the side. The development, in the Muromachi period, of Japanese architecture in which the floors were completely covered with tatami (thick straw mats), combined with the strict formalities of the ruling warrior class for which this style of architecture was principally designed, heralded the adoption of the sitting posture known today as seiza, as the respectful way to sit. Today there are seiza stools available to help people assume this posture.

The northern circumpolar region The extent to which Eskimos seem use the ice floor is a surprise. It contradicts urban claims of rejecting floor-seating because of the cold. It seems very practical to just have a layer of insulation between one and the cold floor. Sitting with legs outstretched and kneeling seem common in practice. Eskimos also seem to build improvised structures out of ice to sit on. Since I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find any reading material on this subject, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve drawn some basic observations from photographs of these peoples.

img.:1 Eskimo woman fishing;2 Ice benches;3 Sitting with legs outstretched; 4 Sitting with one leg tucked under 2

Africa Many isolated tribes in Africa have minimum clothing on and they transition between sitting, squatting and standing effortlessly. They are still in a setting where their â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; involves movement. In in more civilized communities a common rest and static-work posture is sitting on the floor with the legs stretched out in front and crossed at the ankle. This is most popular with women probably because they wear a stretch of wide fabric, that is wrapped around the waist, covering most part of the legs. This restriction might have even lead to this kind of postural behavior.

img.: 1 Himba people of Namibia; 2 Kenyan Basketweaver; 3 Kara tribe elder from Ethiopia 3

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

FROM SITTING TO SITTING ON CHAIRS: A brief history of chairs The earliest chairs were pedestals to place revered figures on. As early as 7500BC there were mother goddess figurines sitting on pedestals that resemble today’s armchairs. There are murals/reliefs from Egypt that show the Mother Goddess Isis on a raised platform. Interestingly, the way she sits is still with one leg folded under and the other folded up, in front. Hierarchically some male Gods are shown on higher platforms. We could say that the first chairs used by humans in the way we popularly recognize today were the Pharaohs’ thrones. It had nothing to do with comfort/ convenience. The posture of the Pharaoh was decided arbitrarily to reflect his physical and spiritual superiority. He was considered the link between the general populace and the Gods. The way he sat had to evoke a sense of reverence for him. So he sat, spine upright, legs together, chin held up. The simple platform evolved to include a backrest and the archetypical chair was born. The Egyptians preferred to sit up so they made their straight backed thrones, the Greek preferred to slouch so they made their Klismos and that’s when postural exploration in chair design ended. Over time, a lot of attention shifted to the chair itself, as an object. Since then, chairs have been made, that looked different but worked the same way as the previous one and slowly, people all over the world have been forced to sit on them the way they do. 1

img.:1 Mother Goddess, 7000 BC, Anatolia; Pharaoh Khafre, 2500 BC, Egypt; 3 Woman on Clismos, Greece 3

Excerpt from blog: Every chair we’ve ever known is just a small variation of the Pharaoh’s throne in the way it functions, which is the way it lets you sit on it. What if, 5000 years ago, Egyptians had chosen another posture to project the Pharaoh’s superiority? 1

img.:1 King Ramses on his throne; 2 Eames’s moulded chair; 3 Nakashima’s Straight chair

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Some of our most famous chairs might have turned out like this, and you can’t accuse me of making hyperboles because I’m only drawing a parallel to the current reality.

Even at the time when chairs spread across classes in Europe and were being used in homes and imperial offices widely in many other parts of the world indigenous methods were still being followed. Meanwhile in Europe, 90° sitting was getting vastly glorified and was being perceived as a dignified manner to sit. Even the latrine was elevated from ground level to chair height, although it is naturally convenient to squat for the purpose. Even today Northern Europeans call squat toilets ‘Italian’ and the Italians call them Turkish. In both cases the artefact comes from a ‘primitive’ less developed place. When the Europeans established trade relations with the rest of the world, they took the chair and chair culture along with them. Even the Mughal kings can be seen on elaborate thrones instead of the original elevated paltform. When the British took control over India and trained Indians to work in British offices, they were educated in church-run schools with tables and chairs to transit into an office where they worked at a desk, on a chair. 1

img.:1 Babur, the first Mughal emperor on a platform; 2 Jahangir, the fourth Mughal emperor on a European style throne

The present prevalence of chairs “Exercise is Optional, Movement is Essential”. -Movement Coach Ben Medder

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

A day in the life of an average adult in a First world economy A typical workday involves these instances: 1) Getting ready for the day 2) Commuting to work 3) Working (Desk job) 4) Coffee/Lunch 5) Exercise 6) Leisure It wouldn’t be unfair to call such a person, active. On taking a closer look, we notice a perpetuity of the 90° seated posture. This seemingly active lifestyle reveals an unhealthy state of living, posturally. Although there is some amount of exercise involved, it is not the same as movement. A popular naturalmovement coach Ben Medder says “Exercise is Optional, Movement is Essential”. The existence of a designation called ‘naturalmovement trainer’ speaks volumes for itself about our lifestyle. We are naturally designed for movement and we’ve reached a state where we need specialists to teach us to move right.

If it’s a question of variation, can’t we just sit on chairs variedly? NO.

The human world is full of fascinating contradictions. Some human behaviours figure in this list. And the only thing fascinating about these is that they make you wonder “How did we fall for that as an entire civilised species!?”. One such idea relevant to us is ‘Sitting etiquette’. We went from sitting/sprawling/functioning freely to confining ourselves to chairs and labelling it as a privileged way of sitting. Then we went ahead and made rules for ourselves about how to sit on chairs in an acceptable ‘civilised manner’. Fortunately or unfortunately, these rules weren’t devised and proposed to the world and then universally accepted. We did not all sign up for this willingly. The story of modern etiquette (that is expected and accepted) all around the world has some (strange) origins. Etiquette rules/expectations go back to some point in time where some higher political/ religious or intellectual

authority laid it down. Although the origins of etiquette itself can be traced to being precepts extolling such civil virtues as truthfulness, self-control and kindness towards one’s fellow beings, it later grew into protocols for manners of dressing, eating, talking and also sitting. King Louis XIV (1638–1718) of France tamed the nobility and impressed foreign dignitaries, using entertainment, ceremony and a highly codified system of etiquette to assert his supremacy. A part of European etiquette which has grown to become universal now, dictates how women and men, women more than men ought to sit. Some recommendations for ‘Ladies’ to sit:

“When women sit down in chairs they shouldn’t sit stiffly at the edge of the chair nor sprawl easily in one, and ladies don’t cross their legs while sitting or put their hands on their hips. And, ladies don’t ever lean back in a chair – it’s undignified” -American author Emily Post (1872 – 1960)

img.:1 Recommendation for Ladies to sit; 2 A meme that I made

“When sitting, a woman should cross her legs at the ankles. For one reason, it is not considered lady-like to cross one’s legs at the knees, especially if one is wearing a short skirt.” -The Etiquette Institute

My stance is that such etiquette prescriptions are outdated, discriminating and irrelevant to the larger goal of doing what’s best for the body. In this age of feminism and challenging the binary model of gender division, etiquette is worth challenging too. 2

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Body language In any community, there are agreed-upon interpretations of particular behaviour. Interpretations may vary from country to country, or culture to culture. Body language is a type of nonverbal communication (say NVC) in which physical behaviour is used to express or convey information. Behaviour includes facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space. Non-verbal communication is identified in humans as in animals, but there is still not enough clarity on whether NVC is universal or cultural. Consequently the theories are divided into 2 models. The Cultural advantage model and Cultural equivalence model. As the names suggest, the former states that people belonging to one culture understand each other’s facial expressions better supported by experiments conducted by Ekman and Friese. The latter is supported by Darwin’s theory of evolution, explaining that apes used NVC, hence it must have formed a part of our basic hominid heritage, challenging the idea that behaviour is culturally inherited. What’s also interesting is how people born deaf, blind also show similar facial expressions as those who might have learnt it by imitating others around them. So the real discussion ought to be how much of our behaviour is learnt and how much inherited. Also, existing research looks into facial expression and gesture and not as much into body posture itself. One very informative source I found was Anthropologist Gordon Hewes’s ‘World distribution of certain postural habits’. The one sentence that strikes hard is “the number of significantly different body attitudes capable of being maintained steadily is probably of the order of one thousand”. All these ways to sit and yet we chose to sit like this!?. Or did we really have a choice?

“ the number of significantly different body attitudes capable of being maintained steadily is probably of the order of one thousand” -Anthropolist Gordon Hewes

img.: From World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits, Gordon Hewes

There is a loophole in the existing system of body language interpretation in both, research and application. It is majorly with respect to western habits and practices. The uncertainty of these standards arise only when a cross cultural context is taken. That is why the Ekman and Friese study is relevant, it challenges the universality of popular assumptions in terms of how we understand non-verbal communication.

img.:Apparent body-language interpretations of leg postitions while sitting on a chair

But till the time there is conclusive evidence about the existence of a universal, non-verbal communication code that applies to the entirety of the human race, I believe, the fuzziness of this context should be taken advantage of. The postural habits of non-western cultures should be acknowledged, accepted and popularised. This could work alongside the introduction and promotion of alternative â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;chairsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; that would allow and facilitate alternative postures. And humans might once again get a chance to use their bodies freely.

Nervousness

Confidence, superiority

Arrogance, combative, sexual posturing

Insecurity, nervousness

Boredom(foot kicking)

Apprehension, defensiveness

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

In June 2017, Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra faced a lot of criticism from the netizens of India for having crossed her legs one on the other when she met with the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi in Berlin. Crossing one leg on the other in the presence of an older person being disrespectful according to Indian culture was citied as the reason for the firing. But there was very little ‘Indian Culture’ in the scenario itself. These were two Indians meeting in a foreign country, neither of them were wearing ethnic attire, nor were they in a typically Indian interior, the one for which Indian Etiquette rules were originally established. This cartoon speculates if the shown amalgamation would have been accepted than what had happened actually.

img.:A cartoon imagined by me and executed by Balaram J.Warrier. “Could Priyanka Chopra have avoided a controversy?”

63 53

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

65 55

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Excerpt from the blog: The cultural implications of peoples around the world moving to a chair based lifestyle

“Human postural habits have anatomical and physiological limitations, but there are a great many choices, the determinants for which appear to be mostly cultural.” -Anthropologist Gordon Hewes

Globalisation has made many of our lives easy, maybe even exciting. It seems fair at the surface. Makes the same things available to everyone around the world. But what constitutes these ‘same things’? Some products, services and practices seem to have definite advantage over the rest, hence they prevail while others slowly go out of trend and eventually get forgotten. This is certainly not just an exchange of cultures but a proliferation of certain cultural habits. But is that what we desire? Talking specifically about postural culture, there are certain postures that are ingrained in specific cultures around the world. These might have evolved this way due to various factors. “Human postural habits have anatomical and physiological limitations, but there are a great many choices, the determinants for which appear to be mostly cultural.” says Anthropologist Gordon Hewes. Over time, we will slowly run out of practice adopting these postures. Eventually, we might even forget how to. It’s already true with westerners and squatting. Anthropologist Gordon Hewes says, “A fourth of mankind habitually squats in a fashion very similar to the squatting position of the Chimpanzee, and the rest of us might squat this way too if we were not trained to use other postures beyond infancy”. Squatting is the most primal human posture and if we’re becoming incapable of doing that, it’s disturbing to imagine where we’re headed.

The comic was made to convey the above message concisely. Before arriving at this I was trying to make a poster series that would provoke thought. After some failed attempts, I dropped that and make the comic. Here are the attempts. This was supposed to be a series of tourism posters in which the chairs were forcibly used, distrupting the postural harmony of the natives in their specific cultural contexts. First I tried changing between autonomous postures only. For example, a Japanese person sitting cross legged and an Indian kneeling in seiza. That didn’t work either. It has challenging to convey so many layers of information in a single visual. Hence, a comic.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

img.:Illustration by @pulpbrother on Instagram

img.:The posture provocation tourism poster series

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

How to defeat a chair? Video I expressed my ideas about how we should rather use furniture in a video I directed and edited. It was featured under the title ‘How to defeat chairs?’ on my blog and was shared on the Social Media platform Facebook. It gained over 1600 views in a few days, before it went cold. Below are some stills from the video. It questions why we have to confine our bodies to the furniture around us. And how our bodies are above design and we can reject defective designs on the basis that they don’t work best for us.

Excerpt from blog: Any chair is created with the intention of accommodating an averagely sized human in the typical ’90 degree posture’ or a small variation of it. As a furniture designer, I’ve been taught how to design chairs in a way they can’t be ‘misused’. ‘Misuse’ translates to using the chair in ways other than the one intended. For example, tipping chairs to feel comfortable. I’ve even been given the impression that to sit on a chair differently, is disrespectful to the design, the designer herself in case of much revered classics. Chairs will suffer defeat when we use them in every way they’re not meant to be used. Make an attempt to explore bodily freedom even when on (or in) a chair.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

The video was rather successful in piquing peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interest. 1.6K views is not something I had expected. A significant number of people had shared the video too. The success of the video was a lesson on how to make a critical concept in a digestible format for the general populace. A tinge of humour does help. Watch the film

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Phase 3

Addressing the conundrum of chairs I’ve already expressed my scepticism over how mainstream chair design companies and brands are trying to solve the sitting issue(s) by making better (more) chairs, which are fundamentally the same. But I have identified some other ways in which people are tackling this issue. The issues around chairs have to addressed from the foundation of the concept of a chair. Archetypes have to be destroyed so that space is made for new ideas. Reverence for the masters and classics is acceptable as long as one has the ability to notice and acknowledge their mistakes as well.

“…the chair is a brilliantly articulated cultural artefact but an irrefutable failure when it comes to sitting” -Alfredo Botello’s interpretation of Prof. Galen Cranz’s message

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Peter Opsvik This Norwegian furniture designer has accepted that there is no one right way to sit and that a user should have the possibility to sit in as many ways as they please. His goal is to design chairs that allow as many sitting postures as possible and to make it easy to move and change frequently between them. In his book ‘Rethinking sitting’ he explains how we have abandoned our original ways of physical activity and movement and moved on to sedentary, automated lives. He talks about how tools make our lives easy but also pose new challenges. He recommends that designers have to be concerned with two sides of tool design: What tools can do for us What tools do to us He has done what I think is some phenomenal work in this area. His chairs have unordinary features that have insightful reasoning behind them. The kneeling Balance chair is his most popular invention. It redefines the supports a chair can offer to help maintain the natural shape of the spine. But I have different favourite. ‘The garden chair’ which reflects the fact that our ancestors lived on trees. Opsvik’s bold originality surfaces as he asks questions like “Should we take more heed of what our bodies tell us and be less concerned with convention?” He poses a direct challenge to the conventional concept of a chair and manages to show us the possibilities that our bodies can achieve and how the right tools can help us achieve them.

“Should we take more heed of what our bodies tell us and be less concerned with convention?” -Peter Opsvik

img.: Peter Opsvik on his Garden Chair

Excerpt from the blog:

An ode to Peter Opsvik Something that I read recently is Peter Opsvik’s book, Rethinking Sitting. The name says it all! Although the works of Opsvik were one of my initial inspirations in the course of this project, the book has some key insights that I hadn’t come across on the internet earlier. I am not exaggerating when I say, this book is in such resonance with my own thoughts (that have been greatly influenced by the writings of others) that it emotionally overwhelms me at some instances! I might have mentally screamed “I KNOW RIGHT!!” several times in the library while I was reading this book. Peter Opsvik is a Norwegian industrial designer, also known as the ‘Maestro of the ergonomic Norwegian revolution’. I’m surprised that more people don’t know of him and his work. He is one of the few designers who have a perceived and worked towards the real ‘next thing’ in chair design and has open-mindedly accepted the fact that every recommended ‘right’ sitting posture is right in its own way. In my opinion, his designs are bold and radical in their ideology and deviate from conventional visuals associated with chairs. Apart from making highly functional sitting objects for regular use, he makes sculptural installations and chairs for metaphorical expression. To give you a glimpse what’s in it, here are some of my favorite instances from the book: When he’s probably the only chair designer who openly accepts and insists that people don’t need chairs “…The solutions that are presented in this book are primarily intended for users who remain sedentary for extended periods of time and for use in those parts of the where people’s physical condition and work tasks have made them dependent on such means of support. I specify this because it is not my belief that everyone needs sitting devices…” This honesty On solutions to Homo sedens (Sedentary humans) “… one is to spend less time sitting The other is to introduce more movement and variation of posture into our sitting. Although the first solution is clearly preferable, it is the second on that I have any capacity to influence in my profession as a developer of chairs and sitting Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

devices. ” This originality “ “Please, take a seat!” is one of the first things we say when we receive a visitor- at work or at home. Perhaps we should introduce more variety into these “rituals”? “How about starting the meeting with a walk?” “Please, lie down!” “Let’s talk at the standing table”. ” This straight faced boldness “In a world already overflowing with products, additional pieces of furniture add to the global problem of over-consumption. Hence it is important to be perfectly aware of their insignificance for our existence and standard of living.” This humility On a paradox: “Finally I would like to underscore a paradox in my profession, from an ethical point of view, I argue for free and varied use of the [human] body, but end up designing products that add to the spread of the sedentary lifestyle. In a sense, these products can be seen as a kind of material painkiller for a general lifestyle.” I recommend this book to all industrial designers, especially furniture designers and design students. If a significant number of designers are taught to think this way, I truly believe that the world would be and it would be a better place.

img.: 1 Peter Opsvik’s Balance Supporter; 2 Balans Thatsit

Terje Ekstrøm

img.: Using the Ekstrem chair

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

According to Varier, the company that produces Ekstrøm’s Ekstrem chair: “The Ekstrem chair was designed in Norway back in 1972, as Terje Ekstrøm wished to design a superergonomic chair that would properly support the body. It was in the eighties that the chair finally broke through and became a postmodern design icon for its industrial aesthetic appeal. The Ekstrem chair is a static chair, nevertheless it has possibilities of movement and variation that Varier holds as key principles.” Another direct challenge to the beliefs about how a chair should ideally function. Ekstrem gives the user more responsibility and an active decision making role in how they want to use their tools.

The End of Sitting- Project by RAAAF The End of Sitting is an installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, philosophy and empirical science. In our society almost the entirety of our surroundings have been designed for sitting, while evidence from medical research suggests that too much sitting has adverse health effects. RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art Affordances] and visual artist Barbara Visser have developed a concept wherein the chair and desk are no longer unquestionable starting points. Instead, the installation’s various affordances solicit visitors to explore different standing positions in an experimental work landscape. The End of Sitting marks the beginning of an experimental trial phase, exploring the possibilities of radical change for the working environment. This project is a spatial follow-up of the recently released mute animation ‘Sitting Kills’ by RAAAF | Barbara Visser, developed for the Chief Government Architect of the Netherlands. 1

img.:1 The end of Sitting; 2 Standing allowances

Alexander Technique and Gokhale Method “The Alexander Technique is a way of learning to move mindfully through life. The Alexander process shines a light on inefficient habits of movement and patterns of accumulated tension, which interferes with our innate ability to move easily and according to how we are designed. It’s a simple yet powerful approach that offers the opportunity to take charge of one’s own learning and healing process, because it’s not a series of passive treatments but an active exploration that changes the way one thinks and responds in activity. It produces a skill set that can be applied in every situation.” -Quote from www.alexandertechnique.com as on 8/9/2017

“The Gokhale Method is a system of healthy posture and movement to help restore your structural integrity, so you can live an active and pain-free life. You will learn how to comfortably alter the way you stand, sit, and move, to heal from pain and return to a posture that builds strength and resilience, and minimizes compression, tension, and degeneration. We are marvelously designed beings, with an inherent grace and strength like every other creature on the planet. If we respect our natural design, we can function well for close to a century.” -Quote from www.gokhalemethod.com as on 8/9/2017

These are physio-somatic practices developed to help people live a more body-conscious life. Both techniques seek to teach people to be more aware of their bodies and be responsive to them. Quoting the Alexander technique’s official website: The Alexander Technique is a way to feel better, and move in a more relaxed and comfortable way... the way nature intended. The Alexander Technique can also help you if: •You suffer from repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel syndrome. •You have a backache or stiff neck and shoulders. •You become uncomfortable when sitting at your computer for long periods of time. •You are a singer, musician, actor, dancer or athlete and feel you are not performing at your full potential. Quoting the Ghokale Method’s official website: “This method educates you in a way that your culture does not, so that you can live a fully-functional, pain-free life.” We have lost sight of what constitutes healthy posture;

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

in fact, many popular guidelines for “good posture” are just plain wrong. However, we can re-learn what we once knew: •Our ancestors knew how to move without pain. •Babies know how to move without pain. •Some cultures still know how to move without pain. Both practices focus on an overall sense of bodily well-being. I understand that they mean to say that if we are conscious of the cues that our body gives us, it’s possible to live a pain-free life. In relation to sitting, though these practices might help overcome the bodily damage caused by chairs, is a painfree life all that we aspire to have rather than a holistically healthy one? These are practices that help people deal with a fundamentally flawed system which requires unnatural amounts of sitting and further dictates certain ways of sitting too. I’m unable to judge if these foundations have the power or intention of challenging the system to bring fundamental change. But I’m positive that designers have not just the power but the responsibility to address this.

Is a pain-free life all that we aspire to have, rather than a holistically healthy one? -My thought

Excerpt from the blog:

Is the best chair, one that isn’t there? Marcel Breuer, one of the early masters at Bauhaus and a pioneer in bent-pipe furniture, theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. That seems ideal, yet a scientific possibility at this point in time. But I have little faith that that would ever happen. We designers are flawed as compulsive creators. We often refuse to see the truth that, sometimes refraining from making another product could be of more use. Marcel Breuer himself seems to share this flaw. I mean, chairs becoming obsolete as objects could even open up the possibility of us going back to sitting on the floor and still remaining perfectly functional. In fact, imagine the amount of money and resource (human and natural) we’d save, not learning how to make chairs and not making them! I have been prejudiced in making such statements about chairs, when in fact, there are a thousand other objects that have been made over and over again, taking advantage of the interests of a consumerist population. Can we afford to do this, considering our current environmental situation? Shouldn’t this be addressed in a Designer’s code of ethics? Well, my aim was to come up with answers and I’ve just made the list of questions longer. Maybe one of the answers is that designers and engineers should work towards creating possible systems of work and life that don’t involve chairs. Right now, if I were to declare “All chairs must cease to exist, this moment forth” that’d be inhuman. We do not have complementary objects that would allow, even if not facilitate functioning without chairs. If we were to have alternatives ready, then it would be acceptable to enforce change. I must confess that I am a person who has, since birth, failed at having strong opinions. Consequently, I am easily impressionable. I’d like to discuss this with those reading, who have opinions similar to or different from mine.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Excerpt from the blog:

Designing for the transition In my previous post, I had expressed perturbation that designers’ jobs today, are most often sustained by the interests of the consumerist population. But a consumerist lifestyle cannot be sustained forever, simply because the earth has limited resources. In the past week, I stumbled upon some information that’s given me hope. I’m heartened to know that, there are already discussions about a possible conserver economy for the future and beyond that, even a creator economy. Economies at a macro level, lifestyles and attitudes at an individual level. These theorized economies are fairly complex ideas. I’m not going to elaborate on them. From my understanding, to explain the roles of individuals in these economies, I would take the example of energy. We, as individuals are consumers of energy today. In the near future we would have to conserve energy and after that, we would have to be capable of creating our own energy to sustain our needs. I believe, when we reach that level of consciousness in the way we live, we will certainly be able to discern and eliminate many redundant objects (like most furniture, use-and throw products, printed books) that surround us today. A future with less and lesser objects doesn’t look very bright for designers? Yes, for today’s designers. But by then, new definitions and purposes for design can be expected to emerge. Creativity will always find a channel to flow. The responsibility of a designer could shift from being a creator to being an enabler of creativity. Creativity that would empower the masses. These possibilities have given me new clarity on which domain I want to direct my creativity towards. I have decided to design for the transition. In this case, a transition in the user’s mentality that goes from demanding a better chair, the best chair, the most comfortable chair to realizing that there’s only so much that even the best chair can do and that comfort is something the body has to find and then that they are better off without any chair at all. So, for now the campaign is not, not making chairs at all but probably designing objects (could be chairs) that would eventually pave way for a chair-free life

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.â&#x20AC;? -Oren Harari img.: 1 All the ideas on one plane; 2 Ideas grouped;3 Ideas caught in the rain, an Instagram story

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

In an attempt to address the issues, I generated 65 ideas, some more achievable than others. A selection of them is presented below and explained briefly.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

One of the ideas was to make a Fair-chair design manifesto for designers and design students. As I was formulating the manifesto, I realised that such a manifesto would only liberate designers from one cage of definitions and conventions into another, more spacious one of new definitions and conventions that I have managed to conjure up. That would again restrict free imagination of possibilities. I decided to leave an open end but change the starting point of designing a chair. A set of questions and perspectives that a designer should consider before designing a chair.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Chair Design Checklist The people of the world have fallen prey. Prey to a plethora of mind numbing, body paralysing, and happiness-stealing practices in life. They’ve forgotten their ancestral ways of bodily functioning and living styles. Those were ones of activity, resilient movement and independence of the body. Those were ones of health and wellbeing in contrast to the pain-free lifestyles of today’s aspirations. Implying that today’s life is one of bodily ailment and we only aspire to be pain free. We have definitely become sedated, numb to and dumb about the injustice that our bodies are forced to comply by every day in the name of civilised existence. In this manifesto we address one face of this folly that each of us is guilty of propagating. The sitzmachine (as the postmodernist Architect Le Corbusier refers to it) or simply, a chair. But all kinds of it included. Chairs have been successful at making us submit to power, comfortably, without opportunity to acknowledge feelings of the slightest rebellion from within. We’ve allowed ourselves to be seduced by illusions of power, dignity, civic and social superiority but have pawned our original memories of life in return. Chair design of the previous generation seems to have taken for granted, the fact that the way we use our bodies today is the best way to. Although a lot of progress has been made in the domains of making chairs faster, cheaper, lighter, richer, stranger, more fascinating and out of more and more materials, little change has occurred in the way chairs interact with people and vice versa. Even the way we sit on them has remained the same since the day the first chair was made, except for some very few, yet noticeable innovations. In some ways, the designers of the previous generation (era) are to be blamed for failing to realise the lacks in the chairs of yesterday and in the spirit of the times (the times of a great industrial revolution when objects were produced for consumption faster and in large quantities than ever before) making holistically underdeveloped ideas and products available to unquestioning masses. That’s what has manifested as a monstrous sitting pandemic just a few years later. Therefore it is the responsibility of this generation of designers to address and rectify the mistakes of their professional and ideological predecessors. A checklist of things that you ought to give thought to, before making a chair in the transition phase

1)It’s okay to sit at ground level, with or without devices to assist you 2)Focus on freedom, rather than support. Support is superfluous, freedom of movement is essential 3)What is the spectrum of postures other than the conventional 90 degree that you want to encourage 4)How are you going to inform and educate the user about the dangers of sitting too much 5)How much responsibility are you giving the user over healthy sitting habits 6)How is the user (creatively) involved in the design rather than being a passive consumer 7)What does this chair do better than any other chair made before this (but looking different)? 8)If this chair weren’t made, would the world miss it?

Critical narrative: Generating speculative contexts In Paolo Cardini’s workshop he had showed us one way to go about building a critical narrative. He had asked us to imagine a fictitious narrative placed in a future context and then derive insights and artifacts from that context. Refer to Pg: for example. In this project however, I reordered some steps in the process that Paolo had introduced us to. I first generated a variety of critical artifacts and then tried to imagine some possible future scenarios in which these objects could be relevant. Here are some ‘what ifs’ I asked.

1)What if, in the future, sitting related injury and ailments become so common and expected in a desk job that workers got paid back-ailment leave like maternity leave, with benefits. 2)What if, in the future people just got tired of sitting in the same kind of chairs and suffering? If everyone could design, what would people do about their problems? In this case, sitting problem. 3)What if the sitting disease became a labour rights issue? An occupational health hazard that needs addressing? 4)What if there was a parallel in bodily lifestyle counterpart of veganism? For environmental/ health/ human rights (instead of animal rights) reasons, some people adopt a chair free living. So public systems will have “chair-vegan” options. Example: restaurants will have floor sitting options/ standing and moving dining options. 5)Sitting rehabilitation. What if people send themselves to sitting rehab facilities and these products are coping mechanisms for the withdrawal? 6)Tables turn: what if by the time when the poorer populations finally have chairs to sit on the higher society has realised the folly of ‘civilised’ sitting on chairs and moves on to ‘free’ sitting on chairs. So now the poor are deprived in yet another sense, posturally

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Excerpt from the blog:

Health Insurance for the Sitting Disease I am not very well versed with economics, medicine or law. I could be called ignorant but for the following case I’m going to overwrite that with ‘innocence’ instead. Innocent because I sense there could be some systemic loopholes in the following imagination. It would be great if people who know about these topics shared their insights and opinions and educated me. So, today my mind trailed off along an innocent, yet intriguing track of thought. Health insurance for smokers Insurance as a concept is designed to cover uncertainties and potential problems. In general, insurers have established ways in which they deal with those with pre-existing aliments, depending on the severity of the ailment, among other factors. While some could be denied health insurance based on pre-existing conditions in certain cases, there is also a possibility of a delayed cover. This is to discourage people from people taking insurance right after discovering that they have an ailment. So, insurance will not cover expenses for a certain amount of time since the starting date. Most insurance companies make HIV patients or old people ineligible for getting insurance. Technically, they would be liabilities to invest in. As a concept, insurance is not meant to cover something that is certain or obvious — else the industry will not sustain. Being a smoker can qualify one as a liability too. Naturally, problems associated with smoking are certain and severe. Smoking, is also a choice, which means, you are inflicting harm to yourself, willfully. The government is obliged to make sure that you know the effects of your choice and has attempted various methods to make sure that the message gets across. Though smokers are eligible to apply for health insurance, they would have to face a number of challenges including additional medical tests before approval and possibly, increased monthly premiums. Let’s compare this to sitting. ‘The sitting disease’ is gaining popularity in medical circles. In many first world economies, people spend 9-13 hours in a day, on an average, sitting. A study revealed that a sedentary lifestyle cost the world a $67.5bn in 2013. Is it only time before health insurance companies start treating desk job workers as liabilities? Simply put, it is no uncertainty that sitting for long hours can lead to a number of physiological and psychological problems. So, if you consciously take up a conventional desk job, you are willfully putting yourself at risk. There are two arguments against this that occurred to me. 93

“Prevent risks from use of any article or substance and from exposure to physical agents, noise and vibration”

A point from the list of Employer’s duties, Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007, Ireland

One, there are simple things that everyone could do to avoid ailments related to sitting. Although up to 30 minutes of cardio- workout can still not nullify a day full of sitting, taking frequent breaks, and pacing briskly for a significant amount of time, alternating postures between sitting and standing, stretching etc are found to help. But the need for such breaks is often not recognised and could be interpreted as distraction from work and under-productivity in some contexts. Our conventional work-standard definitions don’t allow these preventive methods to be practiced freely. Second, smoking is a definite, personal choice. You could choose to give it up as an individual and that would be possible. Sitting isn’t. Not everyone can choose to give up prolonged sitting and have access to alternative working systems that allow other possibilities. It’s not really an individual choice. So what else is not an individual choice? Menstruation? There are a lot of discussions on how menstrual health products should be treated. The demands vary from removal of luxury taxes, removal of all taxes, cover by health insurance, to be made available free of cost. These demands are made from a human rights perspective. Yet, none of these demands have been granted at any significant scale. How long before the Sitting disease becomes a Labour Rights issue, if not a human rights issue? There is an instance of a court in California ordering a Pharmacy chain to provide their employees with chairs. Long and continuous hours of standing had taken a toll on their health and had manifested as exhaustion and pain. “There is no principled reason for denying an employee a seat when he spends a substantial part of his workday at a single location performing tasks that could reasonably be done while seated, merely because his job duties include other tasks that must be done standing,” Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote for the court. Interestingly, the words ‘standing’ and ‘seated’ can be interchanged in the above statement, the word ‘seat’ replaced appropriately and it would still be true and relevant in another widespread context. What are we waiting for then? Coming back to the discussion about insurance; sooner or later, insurance companies will realise losses because of sitting related health issues and they would take actions that would benefit themselves. This would put pressure on the affected ‘sitting employees’ and consequently ,their employers. Do we have to go through this before change happens?

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Targets of Critical Objects Critical design does not design for the market. The products are not made to be consumable-appealing-massmanufacturable. They are not designed for production, rather provocation. Critical design targets citizens and persons rather than consumers and users. I understand that it gives them more responsibility than merely being end-side dependents of a certain product or service. It involves them intellectually as decision makers and propagators of change. Consequently, my design process also had to deviate from the conventional design process that I’ve learnt at NID. After struggling for a while with trying to imagine speculative narratives and corresponding design objects, I realised that the narrative doesn’t have to be explicitly written down. The products themselves could implicitly convey a narrative or leave it to the viewer to ponder over. The products and services are not marketed for consumption but the ideas and perspectives are marketed for consideration. The targets of this project are not ‘consumers’ or ‘users’ of a certain social/cultural/contextual bracket. Rather, ‘target’ refers to everyone oriented to be inquisitive enough to question and understand the way they live. Further, those who are the agents of authority who have a part in deciding and shaping others’ lives. Specifically, it is intended for students and practitioners of furniture design, architects, chair manufacturers, Human Resource managers, labour-rights activists, all desk-job workers, school authorities (state and private), anybody who uses a chair to sit for more than a couple of hours a day.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Diegetic Prototypes Critical and speculative designers imagine and present alternative realities. But this is what science fiction writers and filmmakers do too, except that their mediums of communicating their ideas/concepts/ theories are different. While writers write and filmmakers make visuals of such alternative realities, designers make objects and experiences to convey their ideas. These objects are called diegetic prototypes. These prototypes are not always functional with current technological possibilities nor are they relevant to the current socio-culturaleconomic-environmental contexts. These objects, though uncanny, curious and ambiguous when viewed in isolation, are intended to facilitate the viewer’s imagination when explained through appropriate media. Most popularly, photographs and videos.

“an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling” Bruce Sterling, WIRED, on Diegetic Prototypes

I have invested a good amount of time in deciding what products I should make as outcomes of my project. I have gone through the whole spectrum from “replacing chairbased systems completely” to “not making anything at all, and encouraging people to be physically self-dependant”. Although both these extremes are beyond the scope of my brief graduation project, my guide, Praveen Nahar says it’s good to acknowledge these extremes. After doing that, I have had settled to down to make some objects that I think find a place in the transitional phase between the current reality and a preferable one. These objects stand for much less by themselves than what they stand for in the scenarios presented and how they’ve been visualised in use. I do not claim that these objects are solutions to any of the problems associated with chairs and chair design elaborated earlier. These outcomes aim to provoke discussions about topics like

1)Why are all chairs designed to support a certain, particularly unnatural posture, when there are hundreds of ways for humans to sit 2)Why is the western definition of ‘civilised’ sitting the only accepted definition when many other civilised cultures have their own definitions 3)Are social dogmas worth damaging the human body over, or should they be challenged 4)In a world where acknowledging individual preferences is of prime importance is there a possibility of acknowledging personal postural preferences as well?

Aesthetics of Unreality The keywords that describe the prototypes are SIMPLE, FUNCTIONAL, BIZARRE

Critical objects have to have a functional balance between being too ordinary and too bizarre. They have to be ordinary enough for the viewer to relate to them being present in a daily-life context, yet bizarre enough to grab more attention and curiosity than any of the huge number of products that come into the market every other day. It was conscious choice that the objects had to be simple in aesthetic so as not to divert attention from the actual intended message. The keywords that describe the prototypes are SIMPLE, FUNCTIONAL, BIZARRE The entire ideation for solutions to final prototype making lasted for two months (June and July). Most part of June went in thinking up wild and wide ranging ‘solutions’ or ‘next steps’. After a personal exhaustion was achieved at 72 ideas, I stopped. The ideas were then grouped as “New Products (Replacements for chairs)”, “Products that add onto chairs to change them”, “Systems changes”, “Completely Critical”, with some overlaps in the groups. Aspects of different ideas fused to become one final outcome.

img.: American television show Saturday Night Live has 3 shorts titled “Art Dealers” and each one of them feature bizzare chairs that challenge the archetypes of chair design. Although the content in the shorts is not about the chairs themselves, these prototypes made me think about the power of archetypes and how they could obstruct the emergence of fresh design ideas.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

The final outcome, Version1 Personal guideline for V1 What to make:

1) A product that will creatively involve the user through gamification/ playful interaction 2) A product that will challenge popular visuals associated with chairs and sitting 3) A product to change the conventional expectations of a ‘Good chair’ 4) A product that involves as few manufacturing processes as possible 5) A product that has scope for modification/improvement by addition rather than replacement 6) A product with a critical narrative The outcome: A puzzle/game of modular Self-assembly furniture inspired from Tangram and Meccano Set. With

1) A toy scale version to try out different structures with, before making in full scale 2) Different sets of levels of complexity like BEGINNER, INTERMEDIATE and PROFICIENT. Each set will have components and ‘alternative chair puzzles’ of varying complexity. More the complexity, more the possibilities, more the price. 3) Additional modules could be purchased according to need/ preference

img.: A system of structural support members, joints and cushions that can be put together in a number of ways according to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal preference

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Flaws with Version 1 This is a replacement strategy rather than a modification strategy. It seeks to replace chairs with another set of objects and this is not an ideal solution as it reinforces the consumerist attitude and could lead to a lot of waste. Although the transition between chairs to alternative chairs wouldn’t happen overnight, effectively I see this as a double-damage process. At one end of the line, new replacement objects would be produced for consumption and at the other end, replaced chairs would be disposed. What would become of this waste?

“First do no harm” is a good starting point for everyone, but it’s an especially good starting point for designers. For a group of people who pride themselves on “problem solving” and improving people’s lives, we sure have done our fair share of the converse. We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied— sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions. And that every one of those everys has a price. We think that we’re in the artifact business, but we’re not; we’re in the consequence business. ...designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.” Excerpt from:1000 Words- A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design by Allan Chochinov for Core77

I share the above opinion, but some others don’t seem to

“...what underpins the general shift towards green design is a widespread sense of guilt and self-doubt felt by many designers about blighting the world with too much stuff. The paradox is that the big idea they turn to for salvation - environmentalism - means that rather than endeavouring to produce something new to solve the problem, one that makes use of the best possible processes, ideas and resources, designers will attempt to regain a sense of purpose and credibility by preaching to the rest of us to lower our horizons.”

Excerpt from: The rise and rise of ‘anti-design’ by Martyn Perks for Wired

It is also apparent that this attempt was a tough balancing struggle between affirmative and critical design and trying to do justice to both at once. With the rejection of this, I stepped deeper into the murky waters of critical design.

101

Excerpt from the blog:

A humanistic approach to sitting and seating? “Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with social and planetary responsibility. It advocates the extension of participatory democracy and the expansion of the open society, standing for human rights and social justice. Free of supernaturalism, it recognizes human beings as a part of nature and holds that values-be they religious, ethical, social, or political-have their source in human experience and culture. Humanism thus derives the goals of life from human need and interest rather than from theological or ideological abstractions, and asserts that humanity must take responsibility for its own destiny.” – The Humanist Magazine Although humanism is to do with religious, ethical, social, or political dogma and the true superiority of human beings over them, I have a simple parallel to draw in the domain of design. How different would the objects we design be if we placed the human body itself above social and cultural dogma? Humanist design could be linked to aspects of design like ergonomics, human factors and user-experience. But it could manifest in more unobvious instances. Consider the European Water Closet. It is fact that sitting atop a porcelain throne isn’t the ideal way to defecate but squatting is. Yet, the squat type toilet is considered primitive and rejected for that sake. Professor Galen Cranz writes: “The excitement and disgust Western tourists experience on having to use a squat toilet, even a clean one, for the first time. Though it is an anatomically efficient position for elimination, most visitors feel revulsion, superiority, or some combination of both. Northern Europeans call such toilets “Italian” and Italians call them “Turkish”. Either way, this artefact comes from a “primitive”, less developed place.” Even after realising this, there has been no significant change in the design of the EWC. But the invention of the product “Squatty Potty” is of relevance to humanism in design. It is a compromise a roundabout method, but it is an accessory that humanises the EWC nonetheless. It is also a clever capitalist exploitation of consumer citizens.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Let’s consider the chair itself. Of the number of things it stands for, it is also a symbol of authority. The posture that it commands us to assume is an authoritarian one. Although we might have come too far along the path of “We shape our tools and then the tools shape us” to completely blame chairs for our restricted functioning, it is true that the chair is a tool that was arbitrarily created before it started dictating what is ‘civilised’ sitting.

img.: Squatty Potty ©

103

The final outcome, Version2 Modified Personal guideline for V2 What to make:

1)A product that will add onto existing support elements and change the way we perceive sitting and seating 2)A product that may not have stories of production, but necessarily, stories of consumption *Refer to table of differences between conventional and critical design on page 22. 3)A product that is functional with respect to the human body and not necessarily with respect to cultural, societal and contextual judgements. Maybe even deliberately disrupts these judgements. Owing to the guilt of blighting the world with too much stuff, the idea of a substitute for chairs was given up. Instead, ways to hack chairs were looked for. To make tools and accessories that would help one overcome the limitations of a chair or maybe even ditch it completely. Some of the tools work in combination with chairs, some with tables and some with another person and some in combination with the ground.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

105

img.: Initial trials with Straps and pillows

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

img.: Easing the squat

A major portion of the prototyping process happened spontaneously in the workshop with tools, materials and people interacting. Although concept sketches were made before going down to the workshop, playing with the materials, both, purchased with intension and discovered by chance on campus shaped the final prototypes. Due to a time-crunch, different stages of a portion of the design process became fused. In the workshop, mockups were made and simultaneously tested personally and with peers and suggestions and recommendations were noted Mockups further lead to changes in the material choices and form expression Some of the initial concepts failed at mock-up stage and were rejected. New ideas occurred spontaneously while improvising with successful mock-ups While one prototype was being worked on by the tailor, the next was being refined.

107

Inspirational Projects

img.: ‘The Body’ by Kirsi Enkovaara

‘The Body’ by Kirsi Enkovaara Through the course of the project, I looked out for and identified projects and products that seemed to have a language, similar to mine. Sometimes these projects addressed messages similar to mine and sometimes not. But they all opened up possible directions for my own outcomes.

‘The Body’ by Kirsi Enkovaara encourages a person to find their choice of sitting by discarding learned cultural norms. Trusting in their own touch in order to create the most individual way of sitting. The structure of ‘The Body’ is made from canvas and rice allowing it to be formed into reconfigurable rigid structures. img.: Array by Tijs Gilde

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

img.: 1 Array by Tijs Gilde; 2 Mr T ; 3 Lean In by Materia

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ARRAYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by Thijs Gilde The function of the shapes are not defined and therefore leave room for the user to interpret in which way they should be used. With Array he aims to suggest a new approach for home furnishing, a more open system providing diversity and a sense of individual expression.

Products by Materia Mr T invites users to vary their seating positions. You can sit up straight, on the edge or straddle the stool. Lean In is a piece of furniture that is wall-mounted and forms an invitingly soft support for the body. Lean In is ideal in areas with limited space, or in rooms where you want to create new ways of interacting. A wall-mounted table is available as an optional extra. 109

The Critical Objects IF YOU CANâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T BREAK THEM, HACK THEM! These are the final, Physical outcomes of this project. A set of accessories that humanise chairs. Some of them are humanistic chairs in themselves. All the products speak a simplistic, ambiguous form language. The less defined the form, the more possibilities of affordances that occur from the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creativity.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

111

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Prototype P A simple inclined plane to making squatting possible for some and easier for most. It can be used on the floor and on top of chairs. The cylindrical cushion is detachable to give more possibilities of affordances. It can be carried around using the handle provided.

113

Prototype T A low stool to assist seiza and relieve pressure on the legs that occurs when in seiza. Again, the cylindrical cushion is detachable to give more possibilities of affordances. It can be carried around using the elastic handle.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

115

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Prototype I A plank of upholstered plywood that helps one change the inclination of the chair seat, so that one doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to sit at ninety degrees all the time. This gives the possibility of assuming healthier angles on conventional chairs

117

Adjusting the angle of inclination is done by pulling the straps

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Prototype L This styrofoam bead-filled, flexible cylinder is an alternative to an ottoman and fits any table. It facilitates a number of intermediate positions for the legs between hanging from the chair, feet on the floor and sitting cross legged on a chair.

119

Prototype S A suspension based tool to ease standing and hence make standing a more desirable habit than sitting. It can work in combinations of person-stationary support and personperson(s) as well.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

121

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

The dynamics of how we sit, affects how we interact with each other. In that sense, a chair establishes direction with its backrest. Another factor could be proximity. Trying and playing with such factors could produce interesting results, there is scope for experiments in the future.

123

The strap lenghts can be adjusted easily to change the angle of inclination or the distance between the users

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

This photo series visualises a possible reality where it is normal for people to adopt non-ninety degree postures in even particularly formal and strict environments/contexts. Although chairs havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been completely replaced, there are other pieces of furniture that cater to individual preferences either in combination with chairs or by themselves. These subtly dethrone the chair from its unchallenged, much admired and revered position. The people using the chair but not really depending on it, is meant to hint on the fact that they arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really necessary for our functioning and that there could be various other, healthier, ethical, unprejudiced, liberating ways of living.

125

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

127

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

129

Afterthoughts about the prototypes I had a lot of doubts before, during and after making the prototypes. Questions about what makes an object critical in itself, what are the ethics of making a critical object. Would it be alright to imagine something that is critical and commercially viable? I came to myown conclusions after discussions with my guide and fellow students who are well-read about critical design. I decided that, making something with the intention of having it mass produced later would in itself challenge the idea of critical design staying out of the market and thus having all the freedom to questioning anything without thinking about revenue. So, I deliberately refrained from making things that are refined and attractive, to go right into the market and attract customers. I even had doubts about presenting the technical drawings for these objects in this document.But these concepts could still be manipulated to fit in the market. Maybe that could be an indirect way to expose the masses to new visions of sitting and seating. Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

131

Conclusion We don’t really need chairs, so we ought to stop investing time, energy and resource in teaching how to make them, learning how to make them and making them. Instead, furniture designers have to take responsibility, grab the chance and design products and systems to help transition into an eventual, chair-free living. Chairs like the ones we have now, aren’t the only way to accommodate disabled persons and the elderly either. Everybody deserves a free, healthy life for their body, but the current reality is one in which people are unaware of the amount of freedom they are losing out to chairs, at the cost of superfluous ‘support’. I am convinced that this reality needs to change. Such a change can happen only through an initiative by designers who can foresee the dangers of living and consuming the way we do. There is a need to initiate a change in the definition of design itself and educate the consumers about this too, so that there is a unanimous transition into an alternative, healthy and sustainable way of living. For fresh ideas to originate and spread, old ideas have to be let gone. Reverence for masters and masterpieces might give lessons on specific aspects of a certain way design, but accepting their definitions and visions as the archetypes for design will not allow changes for the better. Even if they did, they’d make it difficult. A culture of uncritical admiration and romantic attachment for the past phases of design will lead to stagnation and decay of the design profession, which is not something we prefer. I believe, a change in how design is taught can surely change how design is practiced. And designers have the agency to change how the world works. Design students must be encouraged to be critical thinkers rather than just problem solvers. They must aspire to find ways to change the world rather than ways to cope up with it. As I mentioned in the beginning of this document, I have changed my ways through the course of this project. I have had some insights about what kinds of habits I’d like to have and Lifestyle choices I’d want to make, when I have to make them. I have started (mis)using chairs differently too. Here are some things that I’ve been practicing:

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

New, personal, sitting related habits 1)I reserve the 90 degree posture only for the most formal contexts 2)I sit as variedly as possible and I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a lot to do with how one mounts the chair 3)As often as possible, I wear loose pants that allow free movement in my legs. I mostly wear footwear that can be kicked off easily, so that I can cross my legs to sit, even on chairs. 4)I never keep a filled water bottle by my side 5)I try my best to take phone-calls off the chair 6)I take as many walk breaks as possible. When all I need to do is to think, I get off the chair and pace around or stand 7)Towards the end of my project I sensed myself being â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;restlessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, I would sit as little as possible, snacks were taken standing, conversations happened standing.

133

Food for thought: “As design has matured over the 20th century and into the 21st century, it’s scope and influence has grown. Design has shifted from the problemsolving activity of giving form to new technologies, through the problem-reframing activity of new product development, to the research and change practices of design thinking applied to management and social issues. However, in cases of the latter, designing often assumes the same rationale as informed the former: artifacts (communications, products, environments) designed with humancentered principles can make activities easier, more productive or enjoyable. The ‘Models of Man,’ as Herbert Simon called them, that underlie much Design Thinking are ones that cast humans as a combination of lazy and hedonistic; individuals (almost never treated as members of communities in any profound way) are only ever semi-rational, and hence need to be nudged or gamified by designs that makes things simple or rewarding.” Cameron Tonkinwise for Critical Design-Critical Futures

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

img.: A quick motivational sketch of me by Saksham Arora

135

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Credits Content: Madhu Priyanka Kannabiran Thought Contributors: Ajitesh Lokhande, Arunatpal Chanda, Niranjan Kumar, Dhivyesh Venkhat, Shruthy Balaji, Aarushi Bapna, Sambit Kumar Pradhan, Praveen Nahar, Mann Singh Performers in Free-sitting video: Ajitesh Lokhande, Anushee Joshi, Aaditya Wagh, Dhyani Parekh, Nuti Mody, Arjunvir Singh, Prajjwal Chandra Prototypes: Kamleshbhai (FID), Kamleshbhai (Apparel Design), Jayaram Kaka, Navneetbhai Photography & Videography: Kush Kalia, Milan Manoj, Shruthy Balaji, Arjit Malviya Models: Pournima Shinde, Chingrimi Awung Shimray, Krishna, Shubhankar Rai Gupta, Sneha Aravind

Anupam

Production, Post Production: Abhishek M R, Madhu Priyanka Kannabiran, Arunatpal Chanda, Shipra Balasubramani, Somanshu Kumar Comics, Cartoons, Illustrations: Madhu Priyanka Kannabiran, Saksham Arora, Balaram Warrier

137 147

Image Sources •Pg No.: 13 15 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.nid.edu/institute/ •Pg No.: 22 4 May, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.cd-cf.org/articles/ beyond-design-thinking/ •Pg No.: 23 4 May, 2017.Image courtesy http://a-pare.de/2014/dystopianpresents-and-dismal-futures/ •Pg No.: 24 6 June, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.berndhopfengaertner. net/projects/belief-systems/ •Pg No.: 25 8 June, 2017.Image courtesy http://aihasegawa.info/?works=iwanna-deliver-a-shark •Pg No.: 26,27 12 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://superflux.in/index. php/work/mangala/# http://superflux.in/index.php/work/futureenergylab/# •Pg No.: 29 8 June, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.paolocardini.com/ MONOtask-project-TEDGlobal •Pg No.: 42 24 November, 2016.Image courtesy http://danko.mobi/ illustrations/ (SPINE) •Pg No.: 44 20 November, 2016.Image courtesy https://kzaiblog. wordpress.com/2014/09/15/design-process/ •Pg No: 51 1 August, 2017 Image courtesy http://www.fondosgratis. mx/?p=gorila •Pg No.: 51 1 August, 2017.Image courtesy en.academic.ru •Pg No.: 51 1 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://azurite888voyager. blogspot.in/2016/04/ss-1919-april-18-2016-223.html •Pg No.: 52 27 July, 2017.Image courtesy https://sportexcelzone. wordpress.com/page/2/ •Pg No.: 52 27 July, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.ascendantmeditation. org/product/transcendant-meditation-cushion/ •Pg No.: 53 27 July, 2017.Image courtesy http://s1.zetaboards.com/ anthroscape/topic/4943904/2/ ;http://www.paperblog.fr/4893669/on-a-peurde-sila-qui-donne-les-tempetes-les-inuit5/ ; http://www.bbc.com/news/ business-36905556 ; http://www.signalblog.ca/?p=12268 •Pg No.: 54 30 July, 2017.Image courtesy https://epicureandculture.com/ himbas/ ; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/garden/11rwanda.html ; http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/05/world/africa/mingi-ethiopia/index.html •Pg No.: 55 15 June, 2017.Image courtesy https://in.pinterest.com/ sabinamarineo/catal-huyuk/ •Pg No.: 55 15 June, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.wikiwand.com/de/ Statue_des_K%C3%B6nigs_Chephren_(JE_10062) •Pg No.: 55 15 June, 2017.Image courtesy http://thiswayhome.co/tag/ ancient-greek-furniture/ •Pg No.: 57 2 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://antiquesandartireland. com/tag/jahangir/ •Pg No.: 57 2 August, 2017.Image courtesy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mughal_painting •Pg No.: 60 8 August, 2017.Image courtesy https://in.pinterest.com/ mscarmelicious/vintage-pinup-inspiration/ •Pg No.: 61 13 june, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.gobeyondtraining. net/blog-1/2015/3/19/the-chair-free-classroom LITTLE MEN SITTINGG Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

•Pg No.: 62 3 june, 2017.Image courtesy http://economictimes.indiatimes. com/the-way-we-sit-what-it-means/articleshow/12211700.cms SITTING STYLES •Pg No.: 81 14 July, 2017.Image courtesy https://www.back2.co.uk/globegarden.html •Pg No.: 83 14 July, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.opsvik.no/works/ industrial-design •Pg No.: 84 16 July, 2017.Image courtesy https://sedie.design/in/ekstremvarier •Pg No.: 84 16 July, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.nasjonalmuseet. no/?action=Article.publicOpen;id=2509;module=Articles •Pg No.: 85 16 July, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.raaaf.nl/en/ projects/927_the_end_of_sitting/952 •Pg No.: 100 10 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.ruaconfettora. com/shop/product.php?id_product=352&id_lang=1 •Pg No.: 118 18 August, 2017.Image courtesy http:// wwwkirsienkovaaracom/new-page-23 •Pg No.: 119 18 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://www.tijsgilde.com/ array.html •Pg No.: 119 18 August, 2017.Image courtesy http://materia.se/en/product/ mr-t/ ; http://materia.se/en/product/lean-in/

139 149

Web References https://www.scientificamerican.com http://www.acmandal.com/ https://www.theguardian.com http://www.nytimes.com http://www.huffingtonpost.in http://uprightmovement.com https://en.wikipedia.org http://www.hermanmiller.com http://ergo.human.cornell.edu https://www.knoll.com https://www.varierfurniture.com https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov http://www.telegraph.co.uk https://harvardmagazine.co http://www.cd-cf.org https://www.wired.com http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk http://www.paolocardini.com http://www.core77.com http://www.opsvik.no http://www.alexander.ie http://gokhalemethod.com http://hraf.yale.edu https://academic.oup.com http://superflux.in www.raaaf.nl https://qz.com http://www.berndhopfengaertner.net http://aihasegawa.info

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Books, Papers, Articles •Cranz, Galen. (January 17th 2000) The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design. W. W. Norton Company | ISBN 0393319555 •Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona. (January 31st 2014 ) Speculative Everything - Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. 2nd Ed. MIT Press | ISBN 0262019841 •Rasmussen, David M..( April 22nd 1999 ) The Handbook of Critical Theory. 2nd Ed. John Wiley & Sons | ISBN 0631183817 •Opsvik, Peter.( May 26th 2009 ) Rethinking Sitting. W. W. Norton Company | ISBN 0393732886 •Pynt, Jenny; Higgs, Joy.( September 8th 2010 ) A History of Seating, 3000 BC to 2000 AD: Function Versus Aesthetics. Cambria Press | ISBN 1604977183 •Czerwinski, Michael.( April 5th 2010) Fifty Chairs That Changed the World: Design Museum Fifty. Conran | ISBN 1840915404 •Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona.( September 1st 2001) Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Princeton Architectural Press | ISBN 3764365668 •Dunne, Anthony.( January 20th 2006) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. Mit Press | ISBN 0262042320 •Mandeville, Bernard. (27 April 1989) The Fable of the Bees. Reprint edition- Penguin | ISBN 0140445412 •Sterling, Bruce. ( October 7th 2005) Shaping Things. MIT Press | ISBN 0262693267 •Norman, Donald A..( 19th 2002) The Design of Everyday Things. 38th Ed.- Basic Books | ISBN 0465067107 • Lees-Maffei, Grace. (November 20th 2014) Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things. Bloomsbury Visual Arts | ISBN 085785352X

141

•Critical design and critical theory: The challenge of designing for provocation| Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, Shaowen Bardzell John Zimmerman •Wicked Problems in Design Thinking| Richard Buchanan, The MIT Press 1999, •Design and Democracy|Gui Bonsiepe MIT press 2010 •Sitting Time and Mortality from All Causes, Cardiovascular Disease, and Cancer, Peter T. Katzmarzyk , Timothy S.Church, Cora L.Craig, Claude Bouchard Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA; and 2 Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA 200 by the American College of Sports Medicine •Contextualising Critical Design: Towards a Taxonomy of Critical Practice in Product Design | Malpass, Matt (2012) Nottingham Trent University.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

Annexure

143

Depth 2MM

108

BACK ELEVATION

2MM Deep Groove for gluing

2MM Offset

4MM Dia. Screw

12MM Thick Relwood

R13

SECTION AA'

20°

SIDE ELEVATION

353 175

350

80 COMPONENTS IN PLAN

PLAN

350

R50

200 350

20°

250

20 6 17

23 8 17

2B 1B

R65

R46

R65

MADHU K

350

PLAN

130

430

3B 3E

R75

2 Inch Thick Medium Density Foam

SECTION BB' 3B Cotton Fabric 1E

END STITCH

8 SHEETS

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH ALONG THE DASHED LINE

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

01 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

PROTOTYPE P

1B/E

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

370

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERNS

ELEVATION

2B 2E

R75

LEGEND

RELWOOD PVC (PIPE) STITCH LINES FABRIC STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

DRAWN

P NAHAR

MADHU K

FOAM RELWOOD FOAM DESIGNED

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

GUIDE

1 GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

145

1E 2B

3B 1B

2B 2E

3E 3B

R530

SIDE ELEVATION

PLAN

450

470

SIDE ELEVATION

100 200

Rexine

113 220

1130

*P1 IDENTICAL TO P2

Cotton Fabric

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERNS

FOAM CUTTING DETAILS

MALE BUCKLE

1 3

3E 80

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

20 6 17

23 8 17

FOAM

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

BUCKLE NYLON STRAP STITCH LINES FABRIC

LEGEND

GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

P NAHAR

MADHU K MADHU K

DRAWN

2 3 4 5 6

DESIGNED GUIDE

450 600

LAYERING DETAILS

200

180 750

8 SHEETS

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

02 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

PROTOTYPE S2

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH A L O N G T H E D A S H E D L I N E

END STITCH

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

1B/E 1E

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

REFER TO BUCKLE ATTACHMENT DETAILS ON SHEET 8

7,8

4,6

FEMALE BUCKLE 1,3

ADJUSTMENT BUCKLE

450

STRAP CUTTING DETAILS

3E 3B

3B 1B 1E 2B

MALE BUCKLE

2B 2E

*P1 IDENTICAL TO P2

R120

3E 1B

165

160

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERNS P1 Cotton Fabric

Rexine

LAYERING DETAILS

405

545

R42

FOLD, STITCH AND REVERSE

R40 FOLD, STITCH AND REVERSE

1,2

3,4 FEMALE BUCKLE

1200

STRAP CUTTING DETAILS

675

380

MADHU K

20 6 17

23 8 17

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

03 SHEET

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

END STITCH

1B/E

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

8 SHEETS

PROTOTYPE S1

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH ALONG THE DASHED LINE

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

R30

3 Inch Thick Medium Density Foam

220

SIDE ELEVATION

530

R30

1 Inch Thick Low Density Foam

PLAN

FOAM CUTTING PATTERN

R110

MADHU K

REFER TO BUCKLE ATTACHMENT DETAILS ON SHEET 8

LEGEND

BUCKLE NYLON STRAP STITCH LINES FABRIC

DRAWN

FOAM

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

DESIGNED

P NAHAR

2 3 4 5 6

GUIDE

1 GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

147

SIDE ELEVATION

PLAN

390

1E 2B

3B 1B

345 2B 2E

325

SIDE ELEVATION

FOAM,MDF CUTTING DETAILS

MALE BUCKLE

410

*P1 IDENTICAL TO P2

P NAHAR GUIDE

FOAM 6MM Thick MDF 23 8 17

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

8 SHEETS

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

04 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

PROTOTYPE S2

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH A L O N G T H E D A S H E D L I N E

END STITCH

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

1B/E 1E

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

REFER TO BUCKLE ATTACHMENT DETAILS ON SHEET 8

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

20 6 17

550

620

LAYERING DETAILS

180

300

250

540

STRAP CUTTING DETAILS

BUCKLE NYLON STRAP STITCH LINES FABRIC

GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

MADHU K MADHU K

DRAWN

2 3 4 5 1E 6 7

DESIGNED

Cotton Fabric

7,8

1,3

4,6

LEGEND

FEMALE BUCKLE

ADJUSTMENT BUCKLE

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERN

Rexine

1124

6MM Thick MDF

240

130

350

140

FRONT ELEVATION

PLAN

270

SIDE ELEVATION

SECTION CC'

SIDE ELEVATION

110

SIDE ELEVATION

R65

R65 R50

Elastic Band in Cotton Fabric Sleeve

Cotton Fabric

1.5 Inch Thick Low Density Foam

CYLINDRICAL CUSHION DETACHED

SECTION BB'

4" Dia. PVC Pipe

PLAN

110

BASE

150

FRONT ELEVATION

BASE-PVC PIPE

150 100

FRONT ELEVATION

SECTION AA'

SECTION DD'

4B 2E

1B 2B

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERN

LEGEND

BASE JACKET

Cotton Fabric

1B 2B 2E 4B

FOAM 4" DIA. PVC PIPE STITCH LINES FABRIC

MADHU K

20 6 17

23 8 17

4" DIA. PVC PIPE

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

DRAWN

P NAHAR

MADHU K

2 3 4 5 6 DESIGNED

GUIDE

DRG. No.:

GENERAL TOLERANCES ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

3E 4E

FOLD, STITCH AND REVERSE

Cotton Fabric Sleeve

Elastic Band

ELASTIC BAND

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

8 SHEETS

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH ALONG THE DASHED LINE

END STITCH

1B/E

PROTOTYPE T

05 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

A C' C

D' D

149

500

2B 2E

1E 1B

350

PLAN

450

PLAN

350

PLAN

FOAM CUTTING DETAILS

290 380

210

750

290

SIDE ELEVATION

FRONT ELEVATION

3 Inch Thick High Density Foam 60

120

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERN

80-

1.5 Inch Thick Medium Density Foam

MALE BUCKLE

P NAHAR GUIDE

23 8 17 20 6 17

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

MADHU K MADHU K

1.5" THICK MED. DENSITY FOAM

3" THICK HIGH DENSITY FOAM

12MM Thk. PLYWOOD

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

DRAWN

350

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

8 SHEETS

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

06 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

PROTOTYPE I

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH ALONG THE DASHED LINE

END STITCH

1B/E 1E

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

REFER TO BUCKLE ATTACHMENT DETAILS ON SHEET 8

350

FRONT ELEVATION

1.5 Inch Thick Medium Density Foam 3 Inch Thick High Density Foam 12MM Thick Plywood

LAYERING DETAILS

PLAN

SIDE ELEVATION

FOAM 12MM PLYWOOD STITCH LINES FABRIC

LEGEND

DESIGNED

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

SECTION AA'

FEMALE BUCKLE

377

Cotton Fabric

1 kg Styrofoam Beads 1000

1030

Step 3

FABRIC CUTTING PATTERN

2B 1B

2E 2B

Step 2

STITCH DETAIL 1 145 30

Step 1

Step 5

Stitch Detail 1

Step 4

1E 3E

R65 3E 3B

LEGEND

1,2

3,4 5,6

250

1440

STRAP CUTTING DETAILS

145

STITCH DETAIL 1

MADHU K

20 6 17

23 8 17

STEP NUMBER BEGIN STITCH

END STITCH

1B/E

8 SHEETS

MATCH THE START AND ENDPOINT AND STITCH ALONG THE DASHED LINE

DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

07 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

PROTOTYPE L

STITCHING INSTRUCTIONS

REFER TO BUCKLE ATTACHMENT DETAILS ON SHEET 8

DRAWN

P NAHAR

MADHU K

STRAP FABRIC STITCH LINES DESIGNED

4 6

GUIDE

1 GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

Graduation Project: A Sitting Renaissance

151

MALE BUCKLE

FIXING STRAPS IN PLACE

INSERTING STRAPS INTO BUCKLES

BUCKLE ENGAGED

FEMALE BUCKLE

P NAHAR

GUIDE

23 8 17

20 6 17

ALL DIMENSIONS ARE IN MM.

GENERAL TOLERANCES

DRG. No.:

MADHU K MADHU K

DRAWN DESIGNED

FIXING STRAPS IN PLACE

INSERTING STRAPS INTO BUCKLE

ADJUSTMENT BUCKLE

8 SHEETS DRAWING NOT TO SCALE

08 SHEET

A SITTING RENAISSANCE

STRAP STITCH LINES

LEGEND

BUCKLE DETAILS