2026S Design a Chair

Marshall Rosenberg

NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION

This is important to us: prioritising difficult conversations by creating space where they can happen.Too often, these conversations are avoided instead of being prioritised.

How can we Create a Physical Space for Difficult Conversations ?

APPLYING RESEARCH ON DESIGN

EXPERIMENTS:

We gave up on the idea of the Veil between the users talking

“I want to stay, to listen to you”.

WHAT WE WANT

• enclosed seating space for two acquainted people
• a neutral “space within a space” that removes hierarchy and ownership, creating shared ground
• setting that helps create comfortable, easy intimacy
• invites open conversation and preventative confrontation
• no set hierarchy between users
• adjustable seating to support individual preferences (height, position, direction)

FURTHER SKETCHES:

TESTING SHAPES & SEATING:

What Shaped Space is suitable?

Weighing the Importance of Proximity

Playing with Adjustability

WHAT WE ARE STILL FIGURING OUT

• How can we best translate our communication research into practical applications within our project?
• Finding the sweet spot between universal and personal approaches to meaningful conversations – balancing diverse user needs while designing an experience that naturally invites deep, one-on-one exchanges

QUESTIONS

• How can we embed guidelines for productive conversations into the design without overwhelming users with instructions?
• How can we embed a sensory feature into the object that supports users during difficult conversations—providing a calming effect while remaining cohesive and purposeful within the overall design?

recap of midterms – questions

meetings during easter break

try outs

childhood as material

viennese locations as chairs

viennese coffee chairs used differently

where we are at now

austrian craftmansip – our ancestors furniture

-> Can traditional crafting techniques be understood as a form of design knowledge?

-> What happens when we translate these methods into contemporary contexts or materials?

-> And can a chair become a way to connect stories, place, and inherited ways of making?

traditional austrian crafts

sketches

This project explores material culture, local identity, and inherited ways of making through the design of a chair.

We want to do this looking at traditional austrian crafts, without putting focus on nostalgia, or glorifying traditions, as some (right-wing) politicians do but rather in the opposite way.

next steps

• furniture scouting (IKEA, möbelmuseum)
• trying traditional crafts ourselves -> material experiments
• where do we place our chair? is it for one person or several people? and what kind of chair even is it?

new idea: hyperlocal design classic