solar fabric

we want our chair to be covered in solar panel material so its completely drenched in solar power.. 

finding this material is very hard as well, we have a sample coming but its not exactly what we want.

solar powered thread is also another thing we were thinking about using, though this is still in development stages and not available.

shh....

we found some cool sound insulation and we got some samples too.

this should keep noises to a minimum inside the pod

no go for lumigram

lumigram turned us down for a free sample, takes about a month to arrive anyway.

we will experiment using a reflective fabric instead.

our idea was to have the fabric light up for personal lighting but also be able to light up on the outside to call out for help.

going with super reflective fabric still sticks with the space age theme so we should be okay.

Lumigram material

we found this great material that lights up, 

approx $50 for a 6inx6in square, prototyping will prove difficult. Hopefully we can get a sample, if not then we could always improvise. 

company is Lumigram and they are based out of Italy.

space age

found our theme! space age!

testing out this reflective gold material

material and layer investigation commencing!

capsule?

came up a better design than the taco, and folds in 2 steps!

collapses to 1/3 its full scale size!

this was a quick test with thrown on fabric to see how everything looked.

fire sauce

we came up with this shape using our system of collapsable spring steel.

we joked around saying it looked like a taco

wheres the beef?

individual prototypes

prototypes of our individual products for our v3 chair

teasers!

teasers of chair v2

full scale model #2

1/4 scale mockups

before anything was done, 1/4 mockups were made to test for any unforeseen problems.

the design was changed as well.

you can see the panels stitched together in the second revision.

Disaster kits

originally our first prototypes were plagued with their cumbersome size.

we were adamant that we didnt want to make a backpack.

our idea was a chair that could be solar powered to charge phones etc etc, had a lighting system and also had the ability to store items.

all of the side connections were supposed to be bound together with rope to give a leather stitched feel to something that very rarely sees a stitching application.

this model was later broken down and every panel was put on hinges to fold flat.

still too big though.

1/2 CNC'd, 1/2 jigsaw'ed by hand.
1/4 plywood
climbing rope

photo disc

We started messing around with how photo discs were very compact but in 1 motion the whole disc expanded to triple its size.

we found out this was due to several layers of very important function and a material called steel spring.

heres a demonstration of what moving my thumb out of the way looks like.

LETS DO THIS! BUT INTO A CHAIR!

Playing with different study models

At the same time we were also experimenting with different systems such as tensegrity models and also hoberman-like connections.

we were thinking we might use a tensegrity system with steel cables to hold weight, we liked how it collapsed flat.

we found that if we started bending the rectangles in the hoberman-like connections that some interesting 3d forms would start to come out. We played with this for a little while..

maybe combining both systems?