Through the Interface

After having talked about Autodesk Research's collaboration with Philippe Starck and Kartell to create the world's first mass-produced, generatively-designed (and made from 100% recycled material!) chair, I decided to buy one. Well, two.

As I mentioned in the talk I gave at the SDSC-Connect event, I didn't find a way to get an employee discount, but I'm proud enough of the work done by my colleagues in Research to put more money than I would normally into a couple of plastic chairs. This almost certainly makes my presentation for the SDSC-Connect event the most expensive I've ever given, at least in terms of what I've paid to deliver it. 😉

Here they are:

Here are a couple of pics of the booklet the chairs come with. Mentioning Autodesk, of course!

Here's a reminder of how the chair was generatively designed by the research team:

Here's the final output of the generative process:

And here's the final chair design after refinement by the Starck team:

As I wanted two different colours, I didn't get them delivered as a single unit. In fact, the black one came much sooner – as the retailer had plenty in stock – while they needed to order a pair of orange ones especially from Italy to fulfill my order (which means that Pfister.ch probably now has a single orange chair in stock for someone else wanting to order one, in case).

This unfortunately meant that I didn't get the fancy two-chair packaging. My manager, Tony Ruto, had bought himself a couple, earlier in the year, so he kindly shared a photo of the box they came in.

Anyway, it's not often that you see the name of the company you work for on a product like this. Congratulations to Arthur Harsuvanakit, Mark Davis and the other members of the Autodesk Research team involved in making this awesome project happen!