Man wedges antique chair into his Porsche, Islington, London, 07/2024
Dead chair behind the Alma, Newington Green, London 07/2024
9 stages of Steelwood Chair, 2008/9.
Image courtesy of Magis S.p.A.
Our laundry chair, Steelwood Chair by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec 2008/9. 07/2024
The blue stools, Perugia. 06/2024
A Journey into Seating and Seating
Since beginning my initial forays into the field of design, through education and professional practice, I quickly realised that the 'chair' and furniture more widely wasn't ever really just about making places to sit. Within the chair as a typology, there are multiple layers of meaning, expression, use, display, and presentation. As my role as a designer and background as a researcher has progressed, it's dawned on me that I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about chairs (I haven't done any studies on this, but I'm going to assume the amount of time far exceeds that of a healthy 30-something white male).
This symptom manifests in a number of ways: doodles of chairs in the corner of pages, searching gormlessly on furniture websites, people watching in cafes, doom-scrolling chair meme accounts on Instagram, and spending the last remnants of disposable income on limited edition stools.
The truth is, I love chairs, furniture, sitting, and seating. I love drawing chairs, and I've enjoyed and continue to delight in designing furniture. I profoundly love the job of being an industrial designer. My intent behind this page is, in part, slightly out of concern for the future of design in an AI-driven world. Recent forays into design research (design thinking) and the minimisation of industrial design work have also become somewhat devalued in the current economic climate, leading to a pessimistic realisation that I should be putting ideas, values and thoughts out there into the real world. Further to that, since finishing my master's study in the History of Design, I've been looking for a bit of a project. It's not that I haven't been busy; in the intervening period since finishing at Oxford 9 months ago, I've moved in with my girlfriend, got engaged to her, got married to her, and been on our honeymoon. Rather unromantically, it was on this trip when the idea for this website came to me, somewhere between Rome and Perugia.
Trevi, somewhere between Rome and Perugia
Am I a Designer Who Writes, or a Writer Who Designs?
This question often perplexes me. While I spend my days designing intangible 'things', most of my thoughts revolve around 'real things': objects, form, connection, reference, place, material, time, and use.
Sitting, much like writing, is a universal act. Despite efforts to 'democratise' design, it remains an exclusive, and elusive profession. Writing, too, is not strictly a professional act—though my 9-to-5 might suggest that this is the reality of a modern consulting designer … writing emails, writing PowerPoints, writing workshop scripts.
I've racked my brain (and my wife's) to think of who doesn't sit. Sitting isn't just about chairs per se, though the modern chair is an extension of the act of sitting as much as it is an extension of the act of designing. As I write this, perched on a stool outside a bar in lower Perugia, I'm surrounded by second-hand smoke and local drinkers on Fermob imitations. My wife, Olivia, and I are seated on Klee blue IKEA re-issue stools. The landlady of the neighbouring bar takes a pause from the buzz of early summer service, settling on the travertine stoop of the adjacent apartment building to finish her cigarette.
It is here in the early evening haze that it occurs to me that the chair, and by extension sitting, is part of the 'social furniture' of life. Though it sounds a bit clunky and a forced phrase, I think that it's useful to explain what this writing is hopefully about and why I think it's a worthwhile exercise. We've heard of social infrastructure, but infrastructure is large-scale, fixed, and inflexible by nature. 'Furniture', however, is a more intriguing term. We develop our own relationship with it; by definition, it is moveable and flexible. Furniture, by its very nature, modulates and scales. These are the phenomena that design, through furniture, responds to—and for some reason, I spend an inordinate amount of time pondering.
The blue stools
The Purpose
In some respects, these short essays are a means of me putting my thoughts in order. In another way, they're an attempt to find others and discuss these ideas in an accessible manner. For me, this writing is about taking time, for ourselves and for each other, to gather thoughts, take a breath, and think a bit more about the material environment we surround ourselves with. That's what we do when we sit; it's for a bit of a pause, it’s inherently linked to our relation and experience of time. This I believe is an underexplored area, but one I’d like to expand on further.
I hope if you are reading this, or a future piece, you have managed to take a pause out of your day and this has spurred you to think slightly differently or confirmed some tangential thought you may have had about a chair or seating.
It's easy in today's material, visual, and online cultures to get caught up looking at the idealised marketing shoots of furniture and interiors, to glamorise or trivialise aspects of design, designers, and furniture, and the actual act of sitting. Though as I will explore, chairs, benches, stools, stoops - seating at large - is a fantastic, fascinating, sometimes odd, sometimes mundane, sometimes exciting, but ultimately human lens through which to look at the world.
Hopefully, this is the beginning of a long-term project, one that proves as enjoyable for others to read as it is for me to write. Perhaps also I will be able to be more comfortable with the position of my practice where I'm both a designer who writes and a writer who designs—each role informing the other as I explore this fascinating intersection of design, time, and life.
About Peter
Peter is a designer, researcher, and strategist living in London. Trained in industrial design he also has a masters in the History of Design from the University of Oxford. He often operates between disciplinary boundaries, building on his experience living in Norway, and London.
Peter Webster
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