Title: “Can I Seat?!� Graduating- Debut Collection This critical design chair piece challenges the popularly conventional chair-design and the posture that chair dictates. The specific furniture piece with simplistic and innovative seating encourages the user to creatively use their bodies in an unrestricted manner. The objects work as the extension to the existing furniture. The body posture is amalgamated and infused into an already existing wing chair in such a way that it provokes user’s sense of sitting on it differently.
The work done to make the temporary resting postures being referred to as comfort Postures has been derived from the initial topic that was Parkinson’s disease. My late Grandfather had been suffering from Dementia which was later diagnosed as a second Stage to the disease known as Parkinson’s. This disease caused immobility and his five Senses including his reflexes to lessen and thus he was eventually bed ridden for the last two years of his life. To fray the issue of bedsores my father brought a mattress for him that caused mobility in his body and enhanced his movement by creating a vacuum of air pockets in the mattress. That mattress has been main source of inspiration for me ever since.
Comfort or being comfortable is a sense of physical or psychological ease, often characterized as a lack of hardship. Persons who are lacking in comfort are uncomfortable, or experiencing discomfort. Nowadays we tend to sit in different postures which may not be good for the balance of our body but they provide temporary comfort nonetheless. Through this project a collection is being developed consisting of interesting new ideas using daily cresting postures being referred to as comfort postures. The aim is to not look at the body postures ergonomically rather visually and to develop surfaces ie cushions, mattresses and furniture pieces with extensions that provide comfort to the body. The objective has been achieved using pastel colors and also by looking at body postures as design language to develop soft surfaces. Through this study inventive ideas for textile surfaces that provide body comfort would be introduces with regards to sitting postures that a human holds.
This research is carried out by studying the human anatomy and documenting human comfort postures.
Above is an Anthropometric Painting. To develop the above comfort posture a human body was used as a paintbrush onto which reactive dye was applied to take the posture impression.
Another Anthropometric painting performed using the above mentioned method.
As mentioned earlier as well, my main tool was photography that helped me proceed further with my project. A photography series was carried out in which different postures were documented. In addition to that no formal survey or questionnaire was conducted as it was not necessary for my research.
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Hence a photography series for peculiar postures were made. The series consisted of five photo sessions one of which was activity based dictating different resting postures. The objective was to start documenting distinctive postures that were further translated in Photoshop as drawings and later rendered down to sampling and production phase.
Winged back comfort posture anthropometric chairs.
This Research was carried out in order to see which set of Furniture is best to be amalgamated with a comfort posture that can act as a furniture extension.
I decided to transform some of the comfort postures as design language that were translated as designs on Photoshop. Once the digital rendering was done this bespoke design was printed on a closely knitted interlock fabric to be used as a comforter.
Other options were given as running yardages.
This bespoke comforter can be customized in a variety of resting or comfort postures.
Similarly the resting postures being referred to as Comfort Postures were also ytranslated a a design language to produce a variety of cushions including anthropometric Floor posture cushions and schenk cushions.
This project fills a gap by provoking user’s idea of using and sitting on a chair. This project has added to the industry by giving in a new and contemporary idea of chairs and other products. Through this project comfort has been studied visually and that is precisely what has been implemented onto the end products. This project explored comfort postures in detail, studying them visually and documenting them digitally, if successful the end products gave in a new invention and if not the processes brought about various learning outcomes.
From the beginning of this Project, as a Textile Designer I intended to produce a vast range of contemporary COMFORT TEXTILES Products that can fill the void of comfort products with this new invention.
The Products include Mattress Comforters Running Yardages Two High Winged back chairs amalgamated with comfort postures that act as a furniture extension.