Where the Wild Chairs Are

According to the MIT Media Lab, we’ve been sitting on chairs for 27,000 years. And some chairs are sick of being taken for granted.

The result: Rebellious Chairs, a collaboration between the Media Lab’s High-Low Tech group and France’s École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (National School of Decorative Arts) that seeks to “rethink the relationship between people and chairs” and design chairs with distinct, interactive personalities, ranging from warm and cuddly to dangerous and territorial.

The video below highlights The Wild Chair–a defensive beast with porcupine-like wooden quills–created by Paris designers J.C. Karich and Pauline Jamilloux.

• The Baptism Chair, a pew-like chair with a money slot for donation and pours “holy water” on the kneeler
• Cocooning, a chair-blanket hybrid that simulates the sounds, ambiance, and coziness of sitting by a fireplace
• DIKTATÖR, which dictates head movement according to the direction of sounds around it
• Lucien, a solar-loving chair that rotates and turns toward the light or sun
• Vincent, a verbally-interacting chair that communicates with humans through a language of real chair sounds

The five-day workshop–held in France earlier this year–was organized by Dana Gordon, a former design researcher for the Interrogative Design Group at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and workshop advisors included High-Low Tech research assistants Jennifer Jacobs and Sam Jacoby.

For more information, check out a photo gallery of the research and design process and view photos and video from the final presentation.