The Perfect Sit

Olivia Leppla

September 18th, 2019

This week’s project was one in which we were told to design our own chairs for specific Simpsons characters in order to match their needs. My character was Lisa, an athlete that never wants to rest until she really needs it. The card I was given told me I had to design her something very comfortable for when she needed to rest. I decided to build her a really comfy chair with an adjustable pillow, and a hover feature. Yes, a hover feature. Even though it can be nearly impossible to make a model float, I still gave an idea of what the chair looked like without the boosters. I only added the hover feature so she could move around the house without using her sore legs and arms. I gave the chair a remote to control the hover feature depending if she wanted it on or not. I think I did a pretty nice job imagining it. 

A big part of the lesson was also learning about iterations. This particular project was very focused on the concept of iterations. Although I had an idea of what this word meant, it still wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Iterations are kind of like different versions of a draft, and that’s exactly what we were doing with chair activity. 

However, I did face a lot of challenges during this activity- especially time management. We were only given a certain amount of (short) time to complete each chair.This was difficult considering we not only needed time to think of what the chair would look like, but we also needed time for glueing and assembling the chair together. I’d say that the most challenging chair to build was the popsicle stick chair. It was difficult because the popsicle sticks didn’t bend, so there was no way to really move them around at will. The hot glue also took a fairly long time to dry on the popsicle sticks as opposed to the other things. 

Finally, when our project was finished we had a debrief. Everyone that had the same client sat at a table and explained their chairs. Again, I had Lisa and it was really cool to see all the different chairs that were designed for the same person. They were all completely different from mine, and none of them were ‘high tech’ like mine was. I remember Emma had a chair with a net in the middle for Lisa, and that Kenan had a bed-like chair. (Kind of like a loveseat.). I can’t really remember Grace’s chair, but the design was almost the opposite of my chair- it was circular and high up from the ground. It was also really cool to look around a see everyone else’s chairs- I started cracking up when I saw Zach’s pipe cleaner chair. 

Overall, I learned a lot from this activity. I learned more about trial and error and how time management can be very, VERY, hard to deal with. I also liked learning about iterations and coming to have a deeper understanding of the word. 

Me cutting out my cardboard chair- you can see my ‘sketch’ and notes in the background.

When our group was sharing our chairs. My chairs were the ones closest to the camera on the light blue construction paper. This picture really shows how different all our chairs were. Also, Kenan’s face is funny.