Radical Furniture Design
Floortime creates a new user experience through human-centered design thinking and innovation. It blends elegant, expensive looks with affordable construction.
Overview
This experimental design project aims to create a new type of furniture designed to encourage sitting on the floor.
It is also meant to expand both the potential and people capacity of the living room space.
Intent
The floor is a popular residence for children, parents, and those at crowded watch parties. The potential for floor seating calls back to design choices of the pre-television 70s and early 80s, in which conversation pits encouraged social interaction as the focal point and main attraction of our living spaces.
Floortime is a new furniture line proposed to effect this ambitious concept, while utilizing cheap materials to attain specific trendy, high-end aesthetic choices through clever use of materials and manufacturing techniques: basic upholstery techniques to replicate the look of channel tufting, and particle board and cam locks to simulate curved wood.
Cam Locks
The two furniture pieces included in the series, the coffee table floorsofa and the floorseat cabinet are designed with both open and closed storage, which conceal throw pillows and additional accessories for floor comfort.
Floortime
5'9"
69 cm
133cm
[44.5 in]
39cm
[15.5 in]
47.5cm
[18.5 in]
Sofa Coffee Table
65cm
[25.5 in]
Floortime
5'9"
69 cm
53cm
[21 in]
42.5cm
[16.5 in]
68cm
[26.5 in]
19.5cm
[7.5in]
42cm
[16.5 in]
19.5cm
7.5 in]
50.5cm
[20 in]
Sofa Cabinet
36.5cm
[17.5 in]
61cm
[24in]
The hope of the cost-effective design choice is to bypass the luxurious niche of design which often serves as the proving ground for new ideas, ensuring a design suited to practicality as well as beauty, before hand-crafted or expensive techniques are invited to fill every gap and crevice; and instead bringing new concepts and beautiful design directly to consumers first.
Process
Initial sketches served only for brainstorming various ideas which fit the prompt.
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Once a sketch sparked an idea good enough, I immediately went to CAD to realize my idea, and went through nearly a hundred different iterations for each piece.
Side-upholstered coffee table
Light-up TV Console
Expanding Console for 100" TVs
Material-saving drawer designs
Initial Sketch
