What’s not to love about SketchChair?

It’s got Open-source, parametric design, digital fabrication and it was crowd-funded on KickStarter!

So what is it?

SketchChair is an application that aims to allow anyone to design a chair and make it (or have it made). You can just draw the profile of the chair and it generates all the profile sections for you. You can then have it CNC cut in your nearest FabLab or using an online service. The application even has some physics in it that checks if the chair you designed is actually stable (I haven’t seen the application yet).

Check out their website and video.

Anyways,

as soon as I heard the project was going to be crowd-funded on KickStarter, I went to check it out. As always with KickStarter, there were different ‘pledge’ levels. I was really tempted to go for the full size Antler chair (their flagship chair) but it was a bit too expensive and I went for the ‘educator kit’. I think that kit is interesting because the project says a lot about future trends in digital fabrication and design. I’m sure the kit will get useful in workshops some day.

For some reasons, there were a few hick-ups with Amazon payments (we got refunded and had to pay again) but the SketchChair team sent us regular project updates and we followed the evolution of the project.

But there we go, 5 months after backing it up on KickStarter, I received my eductor kit!

So what’s in it?

2 posters and 5 laser cut chair models.

It was all carefully wrapped in soft paper.

Each chair is laser-cut in a thin A5 sheet of plywood (although the ‘real’ chairs would be CNC cut).
Each comes with some instructions one a piece of paper.

I used a sharp cutter to take the pieces off the board.

It wasn’t very hard to put together, but it isn’t very stable either (who cares?).

Here’s a picture next to something familiar, so you get an idea of its size:

The result is really cute. I can’t wait to put together the other chairs…

And here is the poster with the other chair models:

So?

I really like this project and I’m glad I helped make it happen.

By the way, here are some other projects I have backed-up on KickStarter:

• The Cosmonaut – a fat iPad stylus (which is being produced),
• and MakeShift magazine – a publication about DIY solutions from around the world (that you can still help here – although, they’ve reached their funding goal).