DES3322: Furniture Design, Practice

The hardest things about the creative act is learning how to start something before you know what it is. The simplest objects are always more formally complex than the mind can accurately imagine. This course teaches design thinking through furniture constructed using a fast, loose & ad-hoc "children-club-fort-building" method of discovering & visualizing while making. Direct-construction design is tangibly satisfying and will provide powerful context for all other scales of creative, design and planning methods. Your results will not be conventionally good-looking, but you will make real & functioning cultural things. All exercises will be dependent on connecting to ideas beyond commonly recognized boundaries of the furniture. Think "Chair-ness, not Chair." You will be taught basic welding and wood joinery to provide fast & viable structural frames, "surfacing" methods in wood, foam and fabric composites, and an introduction to mold making and material casting. You do not need to be good at making, but you must be game to try. Craft is important so-far as basic structural usability is attained. Ideas will always trump material "correctness."

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