Finalist at Zagreb Design Week 2023
Student project at Zagreb School of Design
Student project at Zagreb School of Design
2023
Art/ificial is an object for temporary, open and active seating that reflects the contemporary lifestyle. It is an object-hypothesis questioning the potential of innovative technologies and artificial intelligence in opening up new form and production possibilities for speculating future environments.
Always present in personal or shared spaces, as an on-demand chair or a sculptural object-experiment whose appearance remains to be developed through interaction.
The asymmetric form is created with generative design – using algorithms and artificial intelligence principles in dialogue with the designer-as-editor. Such unforeseen design solutions, though difficult to imagine, in fact follow the optimization principles of natural evolution in form-making.
The lightweight convenient stool (1,8 kg) is made using additive technology – exploring a new field of what is possible to realize through experimentation.
A reinvention of the chair archetype is long overdue in the context of destructuring traditional roles and hierarchies in creative spaces – work and lifestyle becoming increasingly temporary, active, cooperative and open. This should be reflected in active sitting that encouraging connection and movement between multiple activities and contexts.
Initially, the form is created as a calculation of physical constraints and requirements. But in the structurally optimized, uniquely complex geometry resembling a live being — it reflects the natural in algorithms, revealing the play of intuitive balance, movement and inherent humanity.
The final project is followed by a catalogue of generative experiements as an exploration of what is a chair, and what can it become?
"How come we have manufactured a world out of flat surfaces and right angles, while at the same time we don’t have a single perfectly cyllindrical bone in our body, but bones that evolved organically and generatively to bear all necessary loads of life, and to be lightweight with minimal material?"
The work is supported by a five-chapter critical review on various aspects of the relationship between humans, nature, innovation and AI, which transforms the designer's role and through speculative scenarios questions the adequacy of traditional design approach as a stimulus for reflection on innovation in the context we are entering.
The project was created at Zagreb School of Design.
Mentor: assoc. prof. mr. sc. Ivana Fabrio
Assistant: Nataša Njegovanović
Product photography: Pavel Posavec
Assistant: Nataša Njegovanović
Product photography: Pavel Posavec
