Designing a lounge chair is relaxing – or is it?


Tapio Anttila 

”A typical Tuesday winter morning – a slight frost, dim light, and a hint of mist. A perfect time for a little ice fishing trip and give some thought on the design of a lounge chair. The Finnish landscape provides plenty of inspiration, and in a peaceful environment, ideas come naturally. No rush—sketches can always be made next week.”
Is this what a designer's daily life looks like when creating a lounge chair?

Read on to discover a different truth. 

 

The above describes the mythical self-image of a Finnish designer, which, unfortunately, isn’t entirely watertight (unless you count the much-quoted Strömsö). I’m not sure where the idea that design is some isolated act of form-giving, carried out in a lofty chamber, originally came from. In this same narrative, the designer also draws inspiration from the Finnish national landscape or a rock shaped by the Ice Age.

I intended to crush this myth quite a bit by publishing an anthology detailing the phases I went through with my two latest lounge chairs. I won’t dive into why and for whom I design—though that’s an important part of the whole—but let’s leave that for another story. Here, I’ll focus more on the design process itself and, through that, give a glimpse into my daily work.

  

"Things definitely don't always go as they do on Strömsö.”

 

Designing is usually a rollercoaster ride. It roughly consists of three stages: sketches, prototyping, and production. I create the initial sketches by hand, after which my assistant takes over and completes the rest of the process using 3D modeling on a computer. Each stage must be completed before I can move on to the next.

Sometimes, when a stage gets completely stuck, progress simply halts. In those moments, we go back to the beginning, move forward again, and maybe even backtrack once more. This is what we call design…


The first 3D model of the Piena lounge chair

 


PART 1 / PIENA Lounge Chair

There was a lot of back-and-forth with the Piena lounge chair as well. The biggest bottleneck in its design turned out to be the prototyping phase. Since seating comfort and scale are essential for a lounge chair, the only way to properly assess them is through prototypes. This process is slow, expensive, and sometimes downright nerve-wracking.

For Piena, we created about three prototypes, testing them with people of different sizes. Each time, we ended up making slight adjustments to both the dimensions and details. In practice, this always meant updating the 3D model and ordering a new prototype accordingly. Naturally, there were long gaps between prototypes, but there was nothing to do but wait—and hope for the best.

 

”Creating prototypes is slow, expensive, and sometimes even nerve-wracking stage.”

 

In the end, I’m happy to say that "good things come to those who wait"—or rather, who sit—as we have received feedback from our customers about the surprisingly good seating comfort of the Piena lounge chair. To top it all off, it has been honored with two international design awards, the most recent being the GOOD DESIGN AWARD®, and the previous one, Prize Designs for Modern Furniture.

 

 

PART 2 / FILTTI Lounge Chair

This has been by far the most challenging, time-consuming, and longest design project of my career. The idea itself came relatively easily, but bringing it to completion was anything but. With this one, we also created several prototypes before we were confident the chair would even work.

The problem was that all the different parts of the lounge chair came from different manufacturers: the molded felt frame, upholstery parts, headrest, and wooden frame. It took us a long time before we managed to make all the parts fit together perfectly. All parts were 3D-modeled, but during prototyping, there was always some minor discrepancy in one of them. Along the way, we had to change a few suppliers, which further stretched the timeline.

Finally, once we got the parts to fit together, the fine-tuning of seating comfort began. That meant more prototypes, 3D modeling, negotiations with manufacturers, and a lot of other adjustments. Things got so stuck that I almost considered moving the entire project to the felt chain, but in the end, it finally came together.


 

The Filtti lounge chair has also been awarded the GOOD DESIGN AWARD® and the Prize Designs for Modern Furniture awards. After long and persistent effort, what truly rewarded me as a designer was the first customer's comment: "It's so comfortable to sit in, I don’t want to get up!”

 

"The most important trait of a designer is the ability to tolerate unfinishedness.”

 

As you may have noticed, dear reader, this work requires perseverance and the nerves of a cow. I remember a lecture by Yrjö Kukkapuro from my student days, where one of my classmates asked him: "What is the best trait of a designer?" The answer was surprising: "The ability to endure unfinishedness." At the time, us inexperienced students didn’t understand it at all, as we were expecting a much more refined answer.

Now, I have come to understand what he meant.

-Tapio

 

P.S. You can learn more about the Piena and Filtti lounge chairs here.