ME263 The Chair

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.

Winter 2024

Each student's chair must:

be collapsible/disassemblable
be able to transition between states in less than one minute
fit within a rectangular volume no greater than three cubic feet (5,184 cubic inches) in their collapsed/disassembled state
weigh less than 30 pounds