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Ahrend Multiseater

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Product design

2016 - 2017

150 hours

Product designer

CAD modeler

Skething materials

Solidworks

Keyshot 6

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Muse

The Multiseater was the result of an interdisciplinary project where a new office interior or product had to be designed for the client Ahrend. We worked in a team of nine consisting of two Industrial Designers (including me), three Technical Business Administration students, and four Mechanical Engineers. This required extra effort in teamwork and cooperation in preparation for the real life work environment.

We began with a lot of brainstorm sessions and market research. Eventually it took almost six weeks to come up with a concept we’d like to work out. The idea was to make a couch from multiple chairs in such a way that someone could grab a chair out of the couch while the couch would still be intact. The scenario we had in mind was to put such a furniture in hallways where small rooms have limited chairs or in multipurpose rooms.

It was quite a challenge to make a system that would easily allow people to take a chair from the couch, construction wise as well as ergonomically. But in the end we had a design that allowed this. A requirement was also to design the product in SolidWorks, and the Mechanical Engineers had to do a detailed analysis on a specific part of the product that had to be produced with injection molding. During the detailing phase it became clear that most of the conflicts existed between Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering, because either the design did not meet construction requirements or a construction did not meet aesthetic requirements. So concessions had to be made on both sides, but eventually we were all pretty content about the result.

The Multiseater exists of an odd number of chairs that could slide over each other in a masonry style. There are two types of chairs: the bigger half are bottom chairs, and the smaller half are upper chairs. The bottom chairs can be attached to other bottom chairs to prevent the couch from falling apart, and separately placed armrests make it actually look like a couch. These armrests can be flipped and used as a coffee table instead. The Multiseater can be infinitely extended, as long as there is always one more bottom chair then there are upper chairs.