ME263 The Chair | Product Realization Lab
Most of the design classes at Stanford require students to undertake multiple projects during the quarter, which means that there is very limited opportunity for students to iterate repeatedly on any given design. ME263 The Chair was created to provide students with an opportunity to work intensively on a single project over the course of the quarter, and to bring their projects to a high degree of finish. Chairs were chosen as the focus for the class because they afford a remarkably rich set of design and fabrication challenges. A successful chair design requires adroit integration of the functional (ergonomics and purpose), the technical (structure and materials) and the formal (aesthetics, and relation to surroundings). Perhaps it is for these reasons that designing a chair has been a kind of right of passage for designers and architects for more than a century. Each student's chair must: This year a new constraint was added to the design requirements: the chair must be able to be c