The prompt of this project was to create 10 chair models at quarter scale and some component of these chairs had to work with sheet material.
It was really helpful to start out with inexpensive materials to get basic ideas out, but pushing my experience into other materials really helped me expend my understanding of what's possible to push production processes.
I started out just wanting to get a feel for sheet material so I played around with paper, but after a while I really wanted different material properties to give my ideas alternative forms. I used metal sheet for the chair made of articulating tubes because it is malleable, but has much more structure than paper.
I also experimented with PETG sheet, which is the clear stuff in the first two pictures. PETG is a thermoplastic, so heating it up makes it much more compliant to bending. This was helpful for my folded chair, which I selectively heated along the fold lines. However, I did try putting it in the fingerbreak, which didn't break the material. That discovery made me confident that I could really deform the material without it violently breaking. So I tried out my idea of shaping the material using tension strings, as seen in the first picture.
At one point I ran out of ideas about where each of my ideas could go, so I called it a night and when I came back in the morning I forced myself to think of possible iterations on these chair designs. The post-it's under each design are some of my casual musings on different directions to take each chair.
