CASE STUDY / THE ADA CHAIR
A friendly competition over a dinner table and a chair is born
While I was living in China I spent a lot of my time with other furniture manufacturers and designers. One night over dinner we set ourselves a challenge.
I was living and working in Shenzhen, China. I had my own furniture factory that was making school furniture and I was very much tuned in to the design needs of children and, perhaps more so, their parents. I also had a 2yr old daughter, Ada, and was using her as a test subject for a range of new furniture ideas for little ones. (The first House Bed was another one that was originally hers).
Edges and corners need extra special care when designing for small children. Anyone who has ever child proofed a home for a toddler will agree. As we ate we wondered if we could eliminate the problem entirely and how a chair without any corners or edges might look.
We added in another limitation, and one that I hold was key to the design's success, which was based on one of our group only having a small workshop/tools/machines: No single component part could be bigger than 600x400mm.
My idea looked a bit like this. No sharp edges or corners was indeed possible and not only that, it had a unique style.
Something genuinely new in the world of furniture design is a rare thing and while I confess to taking some inspiration from an old Saxon throne (quirky, but I read a lot about the origins of furniture) it was certainly not something I'd seen before in the kids market.
So I made one for Ada and she loved it. Dragged it throughout the house to wherever she was playing. It was a hit.
So I refined the design and made more. And more. In the end we ended up selling hundreds of these little chairs into both the big, shiny international schools but also into the local Chinese schools. I ran little workshops where the kids could, with mallet and glue, assemble their own.
And the original? 7yrs later it sits in Ada's bedroom. It acts as her bedside table, and occasional step-up for reaching the loft ladder, and is as sturdy as the day it was made.
Designers often talk about the limitations of a project being a source of frustration - and that's certainly true - but limitations/restrictions are also from where really good things often come. A blank page, no limits, sounds attractive but there is something to be said for operating within restrictions and the Ada chair is my own personal example.
Available for sale in our shop.