möbel

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  running the sketch on the whoa boards

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  sitting in the model

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Inspiration Its not an app! Ikea furniture is notoriously hard to build. This is an experience thats often associated with frustration. Now, imagine what it would be like to experience that with a total stranger - someone to help and bond with over that experience. We believe that emerging from a shared experience of struggle often unites people, and we'd like to build that experience for people in public spaces. We would like to spread love and bring ultimately bring people together with our furniture piece.

What it does The furniture is intentionally annoying to construct and is physically built around the people who construct it. Only when at least two people work on it, it lights up and activates. The chair is designed to also literally bring people together - when two people are enclosed in this furniture, they must face each other in a constrained space, exaggerating this experience and forcing people to literally break down barriers and build something from them together. In this piece, the final result AND the process both help support the notion of bonding with our community.

How we built it We would have preferred to fab this with a laser cutter or a cnc router and OSB, but for logistical reasons, we hand cut every piece from three large sheets of foam board.

Challenges we ran into Manual labor and measurements! Logistically mapping shapes from 2D to 3D with a weaker material that can't actually sustain our weight makes it difficult to fully immerse ourselves in the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We're so happy that we were able to finish this project over the night - we love how it turned out and really do believe that experiences like this can bring people together and help them bond over shared experiences that otherwise might not be available. This project is a performative art piece, a public furniture, a technology-integrated sculpture and a spectacle with social impact.

What's next for möbel Möbel wants to be more integrated in tech and have many additional capacitive sensors so the furniture knows its progress as its being constructed. We would like to rebuild this in OSB for sustainability and support, and plant it in public pavillions like bus stops where strangers often meet. We can also imagine this being used in team-building applications for companies, where instead of putting people into pretend situations, they can emerge from the experience productively building a real furniture piece.

We'd really like to thank Hacking Arts for hosting, mentors for their wonderful feedback and guidance and Josh Vekhter for supplying us with a Whoa Board and being incredibly helpful throughout! It's been really awesome meeting people with such diverse backgrounds and experiences and we really wanted to make something that represented that.

Built With

• cardboard
• care
• love
• sharpie
• whoa-board