This post is straight from our London showroom,
written by the very lovely Dan Deakins who jumped at the chance to
show of his passion for sofas, design and everything in between -
take it away Dan!
Product design is a much varied and at times mysterious and
cloaked any of manufacturers. No more is this true than in recent
times with Steve Jobs. His ability to not only see ergonometric,
but the beauty in what is by and large a piece of technology, which
can tend to be ugly, was an asset and a financial coup d'etat in
Silicon Valley. But Steve Jobs never conceived anything to do with
sofas or furniture, so why the allusion.
What Steve Jobs did understand was the basics of product design.
He himself is once quoted as saying something along the lines of
'we are separated by our ability to make tool from all other
creatures on this planet'. Therefore if we think of ourselves as
tool builders, are products of our tools or are we creators of our
tools. The question though is much like the chicken and the egg
problem.
What we have to do is understand the product thereby understand
the environment. If you take one of the greatest inventions of the
19th century, the automobile (Karl Benz), but didn't
take off until the 20th century. The reason that it
didn't take off was the environment it needed to exist, roads,
motorways etc… didn't exist. The automobile reshaped the world
around it.
So what am I really trying to say, after reading all this about
design and products that ultimately have little to do with sofas.
Well the point of all this is that when designing a sofa we have to
take into account its basic principles.
Firstly it needs to seat people. Secondly, it needs to be
structurally viable. Lastly, it needs to be comfortable. Everything
else can be tailored to fit. When considering a design of sofa for
our homes we have to take the room or space as a blank, empty room,
white walls and clean lines. Once this visualisation is in place,
then we can become the artist and the art. We can formulate ideas
about our reactions to the space and therefore fill the space with
the reactionary items.
We have to allow ourselves to shape the sofa, but also be shaped
by the sofa!