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CARDBOARD CHAIR ASSIGNMENT
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-- (adopted from Ken Horii’s project & Fiona Gardner’s observations) —————————————
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3. Students are to design a cardboard chair using 48 × 80 inch sheets of corrugated
cardboard recycled cardboard, glue, packing tape, and a utility knife. The chair
must hold the student’s weight for the duration of a class critique (1 hour and a
half). Challenge: not to use glue or tape, and going so far as requiring the chair to
be portable, fitting into a box no larger than 12×18×24.
4. The assignment is fairly straightforward. We will spend the beginning of a class
demonstrating different building techniques with cardboard. We will look at the best
way to laminate sheets of cardboard together, how to best cut the cardboard with a
utility knife, as well as how to join cardboard using paper‐ packing tape. The
strength of the cardboard is maintained by folding: the fewer cuts you make, the
more weight your design will hold.
5. Your design: comfortable and easily held your weight?
6. The cardboard chair in terms of “form follows function” – design principles ideas are
inherent in the assignment.
7. Your class is allowed to use brown paper tape and glue. No glue and no tape are
an extra credit option.
8. You can do this with minimal training, directly. Without shop training, without a band
saw, all you need is a mat knife and a T‐ square.
9. The chair must be portable. Portability comes with the idea that it has to be a
certain dimension, and so the dimension is either a domestic or international
plane’s overhead compartment size. In the airport they have these ridged boxes–
you put your suitcase in to test whether it meets the regulation. The international
one is really severe: 9 × 22 × 14 inches. A slightly less difficult domestic overhead
compartment size of 12 × 16 × 24 inches.
10. Can you build a chair, no glue, no tape (extra credit), and have it collapse down to
fit in that space? It also has to be, obviously, commercial cardboard—in other
words, cartons or boxes that had graphics on them, and you had to integrate the
graph‐ ics into the design of the chair, so there was recognition of the recycled
cardboard as part of the design. There have been all these different permutations.
11. Extra Extra Challenge: fold a 48 × 80 inch sheet of cardboard, with arm rests, back
rests, that was portable and fit a certain dimension—and you had to be able to
demonstrate it a number of times and hold a certain amount of weight. Fold an
adult‐ sized chair out of a single sheet of cardboard with a writing desk that has to
be able to hold an 8 1⁄2 × 11‐ inch sheet of paper flat. You have to be able to write
on the desk while you sat in the chair. All of this has to collapse into a portable
dimension.
12. There is a weight test, which is me sitting on all the chairs.