Press Release
Sempoa Lounge Chair by New Elegant Co., Ltd. Receives the Silver A' Design Award in Furniture Design
New Elegant Co., Ltd. recognized for furniture design by the international grand jury of the 2024 - 2025 A' Design Award & Competition
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COMO, Italy, April 19, 2025 /DesignNewswire/ Sempoa Lounge Chair by New Elegant Co., Ltd. has been granted the Silver A' Design Award in the Furniture Design category, A' Design Award & Competition has announced. The recognition forms part of the 2024 - 2025 A' Design Award & Competition and was reached through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who scored anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.
About the Silver A' Design Award
The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.
Regarding Sempoa Lounge Chair
The Sempoa chair blends traditional inspiration with modern functionality. Inspired by the Japanese Soroban abacus, it features a backrest with moving beads that offer both tactile engagement and a subtle massaging effect. The beads, mounted on stainless steel rods and held by flexible bentwood frames, move with the user's body. Crafted from intersecting solid wood boards, the design balances structured aesthetics with durability, ensuring stability, style, and inviting user interaction.
About New Elegant Co., Ltd.
New Elegant is a creative studio with new business model, integrates diverse disciplines and cultures, that marries design thinking and business network across countries. In the current state, serve to provide end-to-end service from furniture design, production, and quality control. Their aim is to increase speed, helping customers reduce lead times using product design database. They do not forget what latest technology are available at present which will be useful to enhance the development of new designs, new way of productions and solutions for their customers.
Award Record
With this recognition, New Elegant Co., Ltd. is a winner of 1 A' Design Award.
About the A' Furniture Design Award
The A' Furniture Design Award is an international furniture competition recognizing good furniture designs by best furniture designers worldwide. The competition is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to furniture designers, product designers, industrial design studios and furniture brands from all countries. Entries typically include chairs, tables, sofas, beds, cabinets and shelves. Awarded furniture designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/furniture
About A' Design Award & Competition
A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade organized annually since 2008. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The A' Design Award has a philanthropic mission to advance society through good design by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously evaluated by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. The A' Design Prize granted to eligible laureates includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, the upload of a work and the preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. Further information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com
Press Resources
- Winner Page: https://designers.org/164649
- A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/164649
- Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!164649
- Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/269313
Media Contact
Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953
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Fact Sheet
The Work
- Project
- Sempoa Lounge Chair
- Function
- Lounge Chair
- Category
- Furniture Design
- Discipline
- Industrial Design
- Industry
- Furniture & Home
- Colors
- Dark Slate Gray, Black, Dark Olive Green, Gray and Dim Gray
- Images
- 5
The Recognition
- Laureate
- New Elegant Co., Ltd.
- Country
- Viet Nam
- Recognition
- Silver A' Design Award
- Edition
- 2024 - 2025
- Design ID
- #164649
Credits
- Team
- Wei-Liang Chou and Aditya Cipta Sugandha
- Image Credits
- Aditya Cipta Sugandha, 2024.
Design Details
- Unique Properties
- For a long period of time, Abacus has been an important part of life of businessman, employees, even students. This simple yet useful hand operated tool becomes a symbol of hardworking people. In modern days, where digital calculator has been embedded inside our most important tool-smartphone, an abacus is slowly being forgotten. An idea emerges repurposing an abacus in our daily life as a reminder of our hard works while still physically functional giving relaxation massage sensation for the user.
- Inspiration
- In this era, most of our daily activity is sitting. Either it is working, meeting, eating or even relaxing. Twelve hours on average sitting on the same spot happened to many people especially those who works from their home. Inspired by wooden massage lumbar support used by many taxi drivers in Vietnam, the idea is to implement wooden massage beads built into a lounge chair for people who works tirelessly and relax infinitely in front of screens all day long.
- Research
- Creating a product that will be cherished by the user is the wish of all designers and producers. Providing a solution in the product that also connects to the user’s heart, the research focused on blending the historical elements of abacus as an aesthetic feature and a concrete function of the whole product. Thus, by reinventing abacus as a flexible backrest, not only it acts as a piece of art in the living room, but also provides a soothing massage effect for the user. It combines a cultural element with practical benefits, creating a chair that feels both familiar and innovative.
- Challenge
- From the beginning of research, blending an abacus in a piece of furniture, the inorganic shape of the abacus reduces the possibility of the chair shape exploration. As ergonomic is a crucial part in designing a chair, the shape cannot be too rigid but on the other hand it becomes irrelevant to the abacus if the chair is too organic. Second hurdle is finding the balance thickness of the bentwood rails of the abacus. It must be thin enough to flex, yet strong enough to support the user’s body while holding all the stainless-steel rods. The frame also required to have spaces for the rails to slide smoothly without affecting the overall rigidity.
- Realization and Technology
- The expectation to create the most favorite piece of furniture in our living room, build quality is the priority allowing the user to rely on it for decades. With that mindset, straight solid rubberwood is decided for its well-known balance between strength, lightweight and cost. The curved shapes are realized from a bentwood forming the backrest and seat frames that wraps around the user’s body. The large area of the seat allows the user to sit cross-legged, thus velvet fabric is chosen to give a gentle touch to the skin, maximizing comforts.
- Operation and Interaction
- Crafting Sempoa chair focused on touches between users’ body and the edges of the beads. Knowing the fact that responses to sharp edges are different for every person, the rails of the abacus are made of flexible thin bentwood to be able to adapt to the user’s rear body shape. The stainless-steel rods act as the bones of the bentwood rails giving strength to support the user’s weight. Not only that, the abacus horizontal direction combined with the stainless steel rods, permit the beads to slide and spin freely, allowing the user to move around unbound while sitting.
- Project Duration and Location
- The project was designed and developed in Ho Chi Minh from August 2023 until August 2024.
- Specifications
- Width: 720 mm Depth: 820 mm Height: 800 mm Seat Height: 440 mm Seat Depth: 510 mm
- Keywords
- Chair, Life, Work, Massage, Abacus, Wood, Joinery
