‘Alley Room’ is an exercise in furniture design and branding identity. I challenged myself to create a packable, affordable living room set for my studio here in downtown Toronto, using a flare of graffiti and skateboarding countercultural themes (the two often go hand in hand). The rocking chair’s side profile is modelled after the ‘O’ of my own hand style. The larger of the two beanbags mimics the ledged waxed and ground by skaters that you might see in any downtown plaza, and the smaller: a trashcan, adorned with my brand’s ‘tag’ is equally a staple obstacle in the skateboarding community. The coffee tabletop is three of my old skate decks and is reinforced by acrylic sheets bolted through the boards’ preexisting holes. I wanted to take an element of my life that I generally separate from my professional practice and adapt it to furniture design.
This summer project in our program’s Thinking Through Making prototyping course was also a chance for me to expand my knowledge in CAD, as well as Cnc Milling, and material inquiry, ensuring exactitude and durability in my finished products.
The rocking chair started with simple ideation sketches in a notebook. Having decided upon the general form, I used a 3d model in AutoCAD to simulate the finished product. Using this more developed design template, made a number of technical drawing files to be Cnc milled into 3/4 thick plies of Baltic Berch. It cost a pretty penny but that’s alright. Using a laser cutter and tape stencil, my studio logo is engraved on the chair’s backboard just below its handle. The assembly process was straight forward if not a little tedious between extensive sanding, drilling, painting, gluing, more stenciling, and sealant finishing. But through the process I also learned quite a bit about carpentry.
Although my beanbags were more of a return to my comfort zone (machine sewing being something I’m already adept at), they presented their own set of challenges. Namely, material acquisition. Finding a reliable fabric printing resource with the capacity to screen print durable fabric suitable for a beanbag required research. Cost effectively printing logo tags for the beanbags, finding nonslip, rubberized fabric to preserve the bottom of the beanbags, and locating twenty cubic feet of cheap, environmentally friendly fill also required a fair amount of legwork. This gathering process took far longer than the fabrication aspect of the beanbags and I think it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the number of considerations that can present themselves even in the simplest of product design.
Using leftover wood from the rocking chair, abandoned acrylic sheets in my studio, and my old skateboards, I decided to build a coffee table paying homage to a passion of mine in a project with limiting material constraints, and a focus on font creation and logo design. In a similar fashion to the rocking chair, I collected my ideas on paper, quickly establishing my basic design and dimensions workable under my limited material resources. My existing familiarity with AutoCAD, Cnc milling, and our woodshop studio from the rocking chair project made creating the print files and assembly strait forward.
