The Chair: Design Diversity and the Nature of Connections

"The connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that gave the product its life."

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects, etc., ...the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."

...Charles and Ray Eames

The concept of connections is intrinsic to design and nowhere more so than in the design of chairs. No other type of furniture offers the possibilities of making and facilitating connections in the same way or to the same extent. Because of this, more effort and more resource have been invested in the creation of chairs by more people over a longer period of time than any other type of furniture. Indeed, apart from possibly the automobile, the chair is the most designed studied written about and celebrated artifact of the modern era.

The success of a particular chair has always depended on the quality and range of the connections it makes, or which the designer is able to make through it, while addressing a specific need.