The Sum of All Constraints
Konstantin Grcic’s design process for the Bell chair extended to designing the pallet on which the chair is shipped (image: Choreo).
In 1972, the designer Charles Eames made Design Q&A, a short film in which he submitted to questioning by the curator Madame L’Amic. “Design depends largely on constraints,” Eames tells his interlocutor at one stage. “What constraints?” she replies. “The sum of all constraints,” Eames answers. “Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.”
I’ve always wondered how useful this advice is in practice for designers to follow, but in principle it describes a rigour that the industry would be well-advised to follow. Take the Bell chair, for instance, a monobloc chair designed by Konstantin Grcic for Magis. “I was very hesitant at the beginning of the project,” says Grcic, who was initially approached to make an affordable stacking chair that could come in at the €50 mark. “I thought, doing a plastic chair, now? It’s the wrong project.” Motivation arrived, however, when Magis introduced Grcic to an injection-moulding company in the north of Italy. “It was a partner who could give us all the constraints,” he explains. “All the information, all the damage, as to what precisely we had to do in order to achieve a plastic chair of around €50: a certain weight, a certain cycle time on the machine, a certain material. If someone tells you what’s what, you feel more confident.”
“Designing a chair is much larger, you know, than just giving form or shape.”
Bell has been forged in the furnace of those constraints, and is much the better for it. Its rounded shell is welcoming and visually distinctive, but principally developed because it provides greater strength for less material than a traditional chair form, cutting Bell’s weight to 2.7kg. While the desired cost of €50 was ultimately not obtainable, the final cost is not wildly different: €65. Furthermore, the design has been produced from industrial waste polypropylene, which can be recycled at the end of the chair’s lifespan, while machine time was also cut to hit the targets that Grcic and company imposed on themselves. “It may not be a 100 per cent ‘green’ chair, but 100 per cent is impossible to achieve – even in other materials,” says Grcic. “Our chair has gone very far using minimum material and minimum energy.”
This rigour also extended to consideration of Bell’s distribution. Alongside the chair, Grcic designed the pallet in which Bell is shipped. “We always wanted this chair to be produced and sold in high volumes,” he says, “so we got information from the supplier. A pallet has to be of a certain size, because so many pallets go into a container, which can then go into the back of a lorry. It’s all a logical sequence of actions and part of a system.”
This, I suspect, may resonate with Eames’s “sum of all constraints”. Bell is a project that acknowledges the complexity of furniture’s production and shipment, and then tries to act upon the imperatives imposed by these. “At the beginning it was just a typical idea, Let’s do a plastic chair, but we were able to turn that into a very serious project,” says Grcic. “Designing a chair is much larger, you know, than just giving form or shape.”
Words by Oli Stratford
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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