Pinch Chair by Medium2 Studio is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2023 Silver A' Design Award in Furniture Design Competition Category.
SilverFurniture· 2023
Pinch Chair
Client: Medium2studio
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Furniture Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #150476The Design
About Pinch Chair
The Pinch Chair is a unibody, stackable, plastic chair that reimagines traditional designs with a fresh aesthetic more suited to contemporary architecture and landscapes. Designed with a unibody logic, the plastic sheet transforms into a complete chair with simple pinching and pulling moves. Its seamless, cohesive appearance creates an intuitive and dynamic visual image. The design allows for stacking during storage and stable placement on a dining table when flipped upside down, which is convenient for restaurant staff to clean the floor when closing.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Pinch Chair is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Pinch Chair is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Pinch Chair is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
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Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The main principle behind the design of the Pinch Chair is to provide a modern interpretation of the traditional plastic chair while incorporating practicality and aesthetic appeal. The idea was to take the familiar concept of a plastic chair and reimagine it with a new form factor that would better complement modern architecture and design. The inspiration came from observing the widespread use of plastic chairs in people's daily lives and recognizing their practicality and convenience in terms of industrial production.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
Our main focus in designing the Pinch Chair was to achieve a perfect balance between practicality and modern aesthetic appeal. We wanted to create a chair that not only fulfilled the functional requirements of stackability and ease of floor cleaning but also had a visually appealing design that could enhance or complement the interior decoration of restaurants.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
As we celebrate this milestone, we are actively seeking manufacturing partners to help make the Pinch Chair a reality and share its beauty with the world.
Grand Interview
Your innovative unibody design approach for the Pinch Chair represents a significant departure from traditional plastic seating - could you walk us through the creative journey that led to conceptualizing this seamless, pinched form?
At Medium2 Studio, while designing the Pinch Chair, we aimed to explore monocoque technology to achieve maximum functionality with minimal materials and processes. We experimented with various forms and ultimately drew inspiration from the act of "pinching." By envisioning the simple pinch of a plastic sheet to shape it, the Pinch Chair achieves a seamless aesthetic while maintaining structural stability. This design process allows the chair to deliver a striking visual and functional breakthrough.
The research behind the Pinch Chair revealed fascinating insights about restaurant owners' needs - how did these real-world observations influence your decisions around stackability and the unique table-mounting feature?
Through conversations with restaurant owners, we learned that stackability and ease of storage are top priorities when selecting chairs. Additionally, many restaurant staff expressed a desire for chairs that facilitate floor cleaning after closing. With this in mind, we designed a chair that can be inverted and placed on tabletops, allowing staff to clean floors more efficiently. Our goal is to create a chair that not only meets the practical needs of owners but also retains aesthetic appeal and creativity.
Your Silver A' Design Award-winning Pinch Chair masterfully balances contemporary aesthetics with practical functionality - could you elaborate on how you achieved this harmony between modern architectural sensibilities and essential user requirements?
The design philosophy at Medium2 Studio is to seamlessly blend aesthetics with functionality. The Pinch Chair’s appearance is sleek and contemporary, with fluid lines that add a sense of movement and lightness while retaining structural stability. We thoroughly studied modern furniture design language as a foundation, then focused on user needs and made ergonomic adjustments to ensure it not only looks beautiful but also offers comfort and practical functionality suited for restaurant use.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The Pinch Chair is a modern interpretation of the traditional plastic chair, molded in one piece with a sleek and contemporary design that complements modern architecture and landscapes. It is stackable for easy storage and can be flipped over onto a table to facilitate cleaning of floors by restaurant staff. This creates a seamless and harmonious appearance, with a visually dynamic and intuitive design that is both stylish and practical.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 549 mm x 558 mm x 822 mm
- Tags
- stackable chair, plastic chair, pinch chair
- Production Technology
- plastic injection molding
- Design Challenge
- Designing a chair that satisfies both practical needs and modern aesthetic while also being stackable and easy to clean the floor, requires finding the perfect balance between form and function, which can be a challenging process.
- Research
- Medium2 Studio have observed that many restaurants prefer using plastic chairs for cleaning and maintenance purposes. During our interviews with restaurant owners, Medium2 Studio noticed that they had some common expectations and requirements for plastic chairs. Apart from being stackable for storage convenience, they wanted chairs that could be temporarily lifted off the ground, so that they could clean the floor and put the chairs back without having to clear an entire area of chairs. Finally, they had higher expectations for the design of plastic chairs, hoping that they could enhance or complement the interior decoration of their establishments. Based on these findings, Medium2 Studio have designed the Pinch Chair.
- Inspiration
- Plastic chairs are a common experience in modern people’s lives. They are also a superb example of the practicality and convenience that industrial production brings.
The Pinch Chair starts with the prototype of the traditional plastic chair, then adds a new form factor to make it a better match for modern architecture and design. The chair was designed using a unibody logic, imagining the plastic sheet transforming into a complete chair with simple pinching and pulling moves. - Project Duration
- The project started in January 2021 in Taiwan and finished in May 2021 in taiwan.
- Operation Flow
- The Pinch Chair design allows for stacking during storage and stable placement on a dining table when flipped upside down, which is convenient for restaurant staff to clean the floor when closing.
- Team Members
- Ping-Lun Chung
Yen-Ting Lin
Fang-Yu Chen - Image Credits
- MEDIUM2 STUDIO INC.
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