Top notch designer Philippe Starck said the furniture of the future will be 3D printed to fulfil one’s personal desires. Ultimaker and Joris Laarman lab have gone a step further to show that future furniture will be the result of many people’s ideas coming together through online co-creativity and 3D printing. The proof is in the Puzzle Chair, an ongoing project for a design chair made up of 3D printed jigsaw puzzle pieces, which has already seen a number of improvements and evolutions.
The chair began as a “prototype” generated out of a single shape split into 202 jigsaw puzzle parts, which were 3D printed using normal Ultimaker 3D printers. Since then the design has been further improved into a model consisting of 77 parts which can be manufactured from about $30 in filament materials.
The open source project was first developed by Joris Laarman lab, an experiment design studio focusing on trying to visualize and understand how people will be designing products years from now. It has since been published on Ultimaker’s Youmagine online network, for anyone to download, modify and generally play around with.
The project was so successful that it has also generated a spin-off project call Bits & Parts, an experiential lab and playground based in Amsterdam, which uses Ultimaker 2 3D printers to create more Puzzle Chair prototypes. Their basic idea is to use 3D printers and other digital manufacturing tools to make affordable furniture for everyone, by calling makers from around the world to contribute to solve the ultimate puzzle: how to make the designs more efficient, beautiful, comfortable and recyclable.
