Design Strategy- Year 2

NAME= Cardiff’s Connecting Colours: 

I was inspired by jigsaw puzzles and stickle bricks for my design; the bright coloured, light weight and fun blocks can be placed together to make different objects. They are predominately used within school environments as they help to increase focus and concentration within young people. I therefore thought they were the perfect object to use within a Uni environment to help students focus and concentrate on their work.

I want to design a seating area which can easily be changed into different arrangements to ensure that people can work in different sized groups. Each individual chair will not have any permanent fixings which means that they can easily be taken apart and put back together. Alongside this each component of the chair is joined by mortise and Tennon joints therefore can be taken apart and put into a different seat to mix and match the colours.

The product will be made out of HDPE ( High density Polyethylene), due to its flexible intermolecular connections the material can be heated and moulded as many times as required. Therefore in the future if the product needed to be recycled or reused the material can be easily melted down and created into another product. HDPE is also a very light weight material which means that students and lectures will easily be able to more the product around to different areas in the space as well as taking the seats apart. The material is also resistant to chemicals and can be easily wiped which is essential because students may eat in the space as their is a small canteen available, thereby if food is dropped on the seats it can easily be cleaned. This makes the seating very hygienic.

I was inspired by the prongs on the stickle bricks which help stick each component together, however this might be too complicated and fiddly at a bigger scale therefore I decided to just have 2 prongs which stick into a joint to fix the seating together, this makes it easier and less complicated to do. Stickle bricks come in all shapes and sizes; I want to use geometric components for my seating area as I believe it will make the space look contemporary, fun and exciting. I also am intending on using bright bold colours for each piece of furniture, I believe that fun exciting colours and more motivational compared to dull plain colours.