The Katydid Chair
The goal was to make a semi-portable folding chair that is comfortable, complex, and visually interesting. A chair that feels personal and homemade, a chair that you can bond with and keep beside you forever like an old friend.
This chair was built as part of a study abroad program for Danish furniture design in Copenhagen. I spent a long time trying to get the mechanism for this chair to work, and to figure out how to make it sturdy. There’s a lot I still want to change about this chair, and in the future I hope to make a better version with a simpler folding mechanism and a more comfortable seat.
Process
I started with a series of sketches of the side profile of a chair. The X shapes I made intrigued me. What if they were all connected? What if it could fold up? How would that mechanism work? What would have to be attatched and what would have to be free moving?
The chair transforms from sketches, to a model in my head, to a physical model at 1/5th scale, and then after a few rounds of critique, to a full size cardboard model with full functionality.
