Sketch Furniture

Front Design, a Swedish furniture company, are pioneering a new technology they named “Sketch furniture“, also called “gestural furniture design”. They use motion capture to record pen strokes made in 3D and then use rapid prototyping technology to actually create furniture pieces from the motion capture data. This project struck me as really interesting because I have seen a lot of interactive art and computational design work, but I’ve never seen anyone attempt anything with furniture design. I think the concept is very interesting and adds value to the final pieces (which in my opinion are interesting to look at but not particularly beautiful). I also appreciate them making something ‘useful’; too much interactive art and design, in my opinion, is interesting and perhaps beautiful, but has absolutely no purpose. I could see this technology being developed to actually help furniture designers test out their ideas in 3D, and allow them to develop their concepts while thinking spatially, rather than having to do 2D sketches of something that will live in 3D space. I do think designers will become even more empowered if we’re not always stuck working on paper or a 2D screen, but can actually develop our ideas in 3D space.

Sketch Furniture video