This project is about breaking up the intense sitting our culture promotes with more activity. The logic in essence:
1. The western perception of adulthood consists of an office job, driving a car, and watching television on a couch.
2. Such a lifestyle is heavily sedentary.
3. People that sit for long periods of time are at risk for a variety of (sometimes fatal) health issues, as well as muscle atrophy.
4. QED Adult life = death. Stay childish as long as you can!
It began with a yearning to design chairs, and while chairs are extremely expressive art-objects, their overuse for sitting is epidemic in the western post-industrial world. Specifically Western, post-industrial for there are plenty of cultures where floor-sitting is the norm (which requires more musculature) and cultures where jobs consist mainly of manual labor. Therefore I set out with the goal of preventing sitting through furniture. Wait, that can’t be right. A chair that keeps people from sitting? When this paradox tripped me up, I focused on satirizing sitting. But such criticism is not constructive, it’s merely poking fun. Therefore, in the final month of the project, the work became about trying to break up the intense sitting our culture promotes with more activity.
This work was exhibited in the Slusser gallery in the Art & Architecture Building at the University of Michigan as part of the Senior Thesis Show: Launch.