At Design Indaba Conference 2014, recent graduate of Rhode Island School of Design Teshia Treuhauft spoke about how dance helped her to explore the bounds of seating design.
“There is something really intoxicating about the ability to bring something from a napkin sketch, to a sketch model, to a shop drawing to something that exists in real life,” Treuhaft says.
But she also talks about the challenges and opportunities that present themselves when a designer scales their project up from a sketch to a prototype.
These kinds of challenges led Treuhaft to rethink seating design. She collaborated with a classically trained dancer to get a better understanding of our physical relationship to seating. Treuhaft asked the dancer to respond to words such as "comfort" and "stress" with physical gestures. She observed the dancer's movements and designed chairs in response, so as to best accommodate the human body.
The project helped her rethink the way humans interact with chairs and redefine what a chair needs to be considered a chair.
This year for the first time, the Design Indaba Conference talks make their premiere on our app, conveniently packaged in one place and available for free download. To watch Teshia Treuhaft's full conference talk download the app here or keep watching designindaba.com for updates.
