The 12 chairs

Designer: Jérémy Couture

Brought to life by a 'less but better' thinking, the 12 chairs are given examples of how our materialistic culture can create more meaningfully. Meaningfulness leads us on a journey where sustainability translates into multiple forms, from objects created with greener materials to others that provide enriching experiences. A more meaningful materialistic culture means rethinking production methods that are obviously obsolete in our modern consumption model. It also means finding new creativity enablers that embrace people and their relationships towards their global environment.

In a time where sustainability is more than ever solely the green paradigm of recycling, it is imperative to acknowledge the primary humanistic values that lead to a person's well-being rather than to focus on a purely superficial materialistic avenue. Sustainability must be used as a way to enrich a materialistic culture that can't find meaning in objects anymore.

One way to create meaningfully is by exploring values that support the engagement with the materialistic culture. Those values bring the possibility for meaning to emerge through relationships between objects and people. These values can be identified as mystery, environmental consciousness, nature embracement, caring, fiction, poetry, etc. By their interactions with one another, they will form the core of materiality, playing a supporting role along with functionality and aesthetics in the relationship and life between objects and people.

Because all theories need to be confronted to reality, the chairs individually
illustrate several of those values.

In order of appearance below: Carry, Dream, Feed, Fly, Give back, Grow, Light, Slide, Type, Vanish, Warm up and Write.

Many thanks to Virpi Velin for the photographs, Mai Ishizu and Viivi Laine for modeling, Martin, Teemu and Arto for woodworking tips, Devon Osborne, Satoko Taguma, Scott Andrew Elliott and all the others at TAIK.