Slide Chair

Furniture & Industrial Design

May, 2023

Slide Chair is indoor furniture that brings the playground slide experience to the office. It meets post-pandemic hybrid work expectations with its playfulness, office-appropriate design, and customization options.

Change in Remote Work Trends Due to COVID-19

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the remote working trend, as quarantines and lockdowns made commuting and working in an office close to impossible for millions around the world.

The Conflicts of Remote Working

Despite the rise in remote work, opinions are polarized. About 34.6% oppose working from home, while the rest are more accepting, each for their own reasons.

Disagreements Between Managers and Employees

In addition to the conflict between employees about remote work, many managers also disagree with remote work. Elon Musk is a typical example.

In order to mediate between remote and offline work, hybrid work emerged.

Hybrid work is a flexible approach that combines working in an office environment and working from home. There’s a brief breakdown of the 4 types of work schedules of hybrid work:

Questionnaire:

Employees' New Expectations of the Office

In order to find out what employees want from an office environment, I interviewed a company that has adopted hybrid work in the epidemic. 47 of their employees participated in my questionnaire, answering the reasons why they go to the office most often.

Interview:

Keywords for Furniture in the Hybrid Work Era

I interviewed three of the employees who came to the office "looking for inspiration and a creative environment" and asked them about their new expectations of the office environment.

I decided to design furniture for a hybrid work in the post epidemic era based on these three keywords: non-domesticity, playfulness, customization.

Ideation

To try and combine these three words, I tried combining a variety of entertaining objects with furniture and created prototypes to get a feel for it.

Minimalist: Combining A Slide with A Chair

In order to bring back the purity of the functions of the slide and the chair, I expressed the most important functions of both in the simplest way, geometrically. And try to add customizable features in them.

Prototyping

Final Concept

After the final prototype, I optimized the structure of Slide Chair to make it more sturdy and easy to manufacture. I also chose two colors for it to enrich its visual impression.