[2008-09-02] Street spam lounger featured in MAKE magazine
My street spam lounger prototype, which has been posted on my old site for nearly seven years now, has attracted the attention of the good folks over at MAKE magazine, who published a page about it, with a big grinning picture of yours truly, in issue #15. The photo you see above was taken about a month ago, and shows the chair to be in good shape after 7 years of almost-continuous use.
For anyone who's interested in making their own, a plan is available, at the original page, in a variety of vector formats. Fair warning, though: It's a lot of tedious work making one of these by hand. In the first case, this is a prototype design and it isn't really optimized yet. Among other faults, it's too blocky for my taste. I'd like to keep the same general profile but round off the corners some, and contour the seat and back a little bit to make a softer, better-looking, and more comfortable profile. Secondly, the idea was not really intended as a DIY project, but more as a commercial product which could use reclaimed signs as a raw material for a manufacturing process of at least light-industrial scale. Which is to say, I always imagined these beasties would be die-cut using appropriate machinery, so they could be stamped out at one a minute or so. Making one by hand will take four or five hours, probably.
That being said, I would love to hear from anyone who tries to make their own or a similar design, or indeed from anyone who builds anything nifty out of reclaimed coroplast signs. Send me a pic and I'll post it here!
last modified 2009-03-03