Sofas, park benches, and loungers are pretty standard-looking these days, but what will we be sitting on in the future? From meditation pods modeled after anime to a slightly phallic motorized rocking chair, here are eight designs that hint at the possibilities.
1. Novague, a design studio in Prague, imagines a sleek white motorized chair that uses the rocking motion to generate electricity that powers an adjacent LED reading lamp hanging above the head.
2. Jeff Lawber created this concept using Rhino v4. He imagines it as a hybrid between a bean bag and a park bench; I would like to have one in my living room so I could teach my dogs to jump through hoops.
3. These beautiful, assymerical flower petals by Alex Cozma are designed for big open spaces, like parks and museums. Pretty.
4. Tokujin Yoshioka famously made this design-y chair out of natural crystals by submerging a nucleation-inducing fiber structure into giant water tanks. When I saw the installation in Tokyo last fall, it had grown quite a lot bigger than this, but still didn’t look comfortable to sit in.
6. This real 80% recycled aluminum bench designed by architect Frank Gehry really exists and will be auctioned to the public in May.
7. Nimbus is great for those who want to meditate, simulate sitting on a cloud, or pretend they’re Dragon Ball Z characters. Inspired by the Japanese anime, the chair– imagined by Bobby Lowe–uses Maglev technology to create the sensation of levitating. It also slowly rotates for those who want to check out the view.
8. Do you wish you could lie on the grass all day without ever leaving your house? Designer Sebastian Pulgar Arata‘s astroturf-like lounger makes that possible.
[Sources: 1, 6-Dezeen; 2, 5, 3, 7, and 8-Yanko Design]
pfft. everyone knows that in the future we won’t need chairs.
Ouch … that first chair looks like a prototype Gelding Gin.
Just slide on and snip off.
Design hurts your butt two times, when you buy it, and when you sit on it.
Those are chairs only in name and only because the artists so categorized them.
Seriously, how are they better than La-Z-Boys? My wife says that her naps in the La-Z-Boy are more restful than in bed, and I concur. As for “art”, I’ll go to the museum for that.
all the above crits were said to eames as well.