Gallery: The Lowly Folding Chair, Reimagined With Algorithms
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Meet Swish, a folding stool with simple looks that belie how it was made.
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Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, had designed the stool for Italian furniture company Cassina. The stool looks midcentury modern, but Ratti designed it using parametric design.
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The chair’s 27 cherry wood pieces interlock via a series of hinges. Those hinges all conform to a slightly different shape, which let the stool kind of twirl open, like it’s doing a cartwheel.
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Ratti a series of inputs into modeling software, a furniture-making technique he calls “programmable wood”. The stool needed to fit certain weight and height requirements, and to stand in a more unique configuration than an average folding chair.
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It also had to be comfortable, so Ratti designed the seat shape around a 3-D scan of a human body.
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Unlike other examples of parametric design, which tend to look bony and organic, Swish looks pretty normal. Ratti prefers that. With Swish, he’s exploring an aesthetic he calls digital minimal.
