Campfire Conversation
Made exclusively from greenwood, this lounge chair explores how natural material and form can evoke the warmth of shared human experiences. The design aims to recreate the intimate, grounded feeling of a campfire conversation through the tactile surfaces and grain. Made with collaborators Alivia Jiang and Rylee Whit.
Process
I started by doing some chair concept ideas to get a vague concept of the aesthetics of our chair. Then we produced an ergonomic prototype following the angles and measurements we found the most comfortable through user testing.
Starting with raw logs, we used a custom chainsaw setup to split them in half, planed the pieces to a uniform 1.5-inch thickness, and removed the bark to reveal the natural grain beneath—preparing the material for joinery.
Full-scale templates from our CAD model guided the precise cutting of the chair’s frame.
Warp and Resolve
As the greenwood dried, the joint connecting the seat and headrest frame loosened—a reminder of the material’s unpredictable nature. With limited time, we reinforced the connection using wood glue and supplemented it with a metal L-bracket to ensure the chair remained stable and functional..
The metal bracket ended up being a subtle way to reinforce the chair, without compromising any of the aesthetics of the frame structure.
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The
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Grain
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Go
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With
Go with the Grain.
Even though the greenwood presented many design challenges, it taught valuable lessons about the constraints of materials and how to problem solve quickly to produce the best design outcome.