Habit Forming

red dot
red dot award: design concept 2007

design:

Lunar Design

In-house design:

Ken Wood, Alberto Villarreal, Evelyne Chaubert, Scot Herbst

Habit Forming is a collection of chair concepts that explores the idea of what is a good or bad habit. Each concept embraces the habit of piling clothes on chairs or trying to keep unwanted things (like pets) off chairs. The concepts challenge the way we view the typical function of a chair.

Clothes often find their way to nearby furniture rather than to the clothes hamper or the closet because of convenience and, over time, force of habit. Rather than focus on design solutions that seek to mitigate the effects of so-called bad habits or change the individual with the bad habits, the goal was to create designs that honour, celebrate and playfully interact with those habits.  

Design can solve many problems that improve the human condition and enrich cultures through the creation of beautiful objects. A key power of design that is often overlooked is its ability to make us stop and think. These concepts highlight this power by imbuing the ordinary and the expected with a visual story that challenges and pokes fun at the status quo. These designs are inspired by habits that are generally thought to be bad. The designs enable those habits and create fun, whimsy and honour from common human behavior. They demonstrate that design can literally turn bad habits into behaviors worth keeping or adopting.

Hampered Seating is a chair that doesn’t become functional as a chair until it has been filled with cast-off clothes. But just when it becomes comfortable for sitting, it’s time to do the laundry again, emptying the chair of its cushion and readying the cycle to be repeated. Clothes Hanger acknowledges that many use their bedside chair principally, if not exclusively, as their clothes valet. Rather than using the design approach of conventional clothes valets, the chair shape is outlined with a wire clothes hanger-like steel tube to make it clear that this chair is not for sitting but to elevate a formerly “bad” habit into the only function of the chair.

The design team sought to express the concept’s function through the appearance of the three chairs. While at first glance the form of each “chair” alludes to its conventional function, deeper reflection reveals they are not meant for sitting, but are directly inspired by the bad habit or unwanted result.