Design Here, There and Everywhere...: Ake Dil ( One Heart )

Ake Dil is what we named the chair we made for our furniture project! All four of us had been looking at curved shapes and furniture for inspiration as soon as we got the project brief so we decide to look at the female body because of the curves. After looking at the Kamasutra Temple ( Lakshman Temple)http://www.shunya.net/Pictures/NorthIndia/Khajuraho/Khajuraho.htm we noticed how the female and male figures were intersecting each other and you can hardly figure out the different parts of bodies because the sculptures are very complicated. This was an ideal concept for our chair so we then came up with all different ideas and sketches , mostly curvy shapes but some also with both curves and straight lines ( representing the male body ). Having the title '' One Body, One Heart'' in mind we tried to bring both curves and boldness into our design combining both got really interesting as each one of us had different ideas.

After some more research and looking at other designers works and being inspired by many other pieces of furniture we came across Richard Deacon who was our main inspiration! http://www.richarddeacon.net/ . All of his sculptures consist of curves and a lot of them are continuous curvy shapes.
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We realized that in order to achieve something similar we would have to learn how to steam bend and laminate wood. You can only learn these techniques by practicing so before we knew it we were in the workshop steam bending and doing things we never imagined we would be doing. But before you can do either of these, you have to make a jig which you will then use to bend the steamed wood over and hold the two with clamps. This is what it looks like when it is left in the jig to cool down and form a curve.

Steam bending is not an easy process as you have to work extremely fast and with care because if the wood cools down in the process of bending it round the jig it is most likely to snap, leaving you with a piece of timber you cannot use again which is a waste but also loss of time as you have to keep each piece of wood in the steamer for nearly 2 hours which only allowed us to bend one piece a day. We also had a limited amount of wood we could use so we couldn't really afford making mistakes.

Here is one of our initial tests (failure)
before we started making our chair :

After a lot of hard work and many little problems we managed to overcome we had our beautiful final outcome which we were all proud of and thankful of each other for our great team work and coordination because it is impossible to achieve something like this alone. Sometimes even all four of us weren't enough as each of us had there own job, e.g I was clamping the wood with Fawn while Duncan was forcing the wood round the jig with Malcolm ( our tutor) and Christina was making sure there were no snaps or gaps formed between the timber and jig.

Nearly done! (not)

Once all the components are made and finally put together you suddenly feel so relieved and happy it's finally over although there is still a lot to do..... We also changed our design slightly because our initialy design had a back support decorated with Hindu designs which we used the laser cutter to etch it on then laminated strips of ply together in order to curve it. When the chair was put together we decided to keep it simple is it were already a very dynamic shape and we felt like the decoration took the beauty of the structure away. We didn't feel like it was incomplete and we actually made it in such way that you can attach the back piece if you want to.
Here are some images of it being made and being tried on the chair :

Sanding the final piece down and making it look smooth took ages and it got very messy at one point but it was worth all the work. After it has been sanded down it needs to be waxed so that the wood keeps in good condition and doesn't rot.

Below are our presentation sheets and our finished chair. :-)