Week 6 - A room for the transformative body

I found this task a bit challenging in that all my components already encompassed movement - the rolling canvases, sliding seats, and hinged cupboard door. I initially wanted to isolate rolling as the movement for the seating, but then found it really confusing trying to differentiate it from sliding as it already existed in the component. For this reason, I decided to extend the sliding component and incorporate the motion of advancing and withdrawing as I had found from site observations.

I first sketched a few different ways this could be achieved through simple pivoting:

After doing a bit of research on furniture design, I was taken by this simple idea of corrugated cardboard furniture which could expand and retract - exactly what I wanted.




It's clear that this material works best when the corrugation runs vertically, as the depth allows for excellent transfer of loads. 

I did a few sketches to see how it would work, the realised that there needed to be a top plate of sorts for the actual sorts to make it a seat. I used cardboard tubing that's also prevalent in the structure, but this time cut them in half as arches. This would help to distribute loads. They're also aligned so that the lines follow your legs when you sit, making it more comfortable than if they were to go in the other direction. A smaller hinged flap acts as the interim between that and the rest of the cardboard, being the same depth width as the cardboard in compression, to allow for a flush fold of the seat plate over the top.

To really activate the seat as more than just a seat, I then decided to cut a hole in the centre so it could also act as a framing device. This was realised simply by allowing it to slide on a track up the poles to frame a section of the works on the canvas. Below are a few images from my process and the final device itself:

(Ignore the 'continuous')