Industrially Designed

Industrial design has made a tremendous impact on our everyday lives, producing mass produced products that we encounter on a daily basis. As mentioned in the documentary Objectified, such objects include vacuums, cameras, cars, and (something that we can consider as an everyday object in our modern society) the iPhone. Behind these objects, form and content work to together to create an object that can function in a person's day to day activities.

The aspects of form, content, and functionality may pass our minds as we use these objects, especially with all the technology that is involved with today's electronics. But aside from these "technological" electronics we use everyday, the aspects of form, content, and functionality passes our minds when it comes to the simplest objects. For example, the chair.

The chair is a mass produced object who's content is its functionality. A typical chair's form usually, such as this one, has four legs for support, a seat for its user, and a rest for the back. This chair, like most mass produced chairs, exhibits bilateral symmetry across a vertical axis. With this symmetry, the user has balance on the chair.

Chairs have been modified to function within an office environment. Instead of four static legs for support, wheels have bee applied for easy movement around the office. Keeping a sense of bilateral symmetry, arm rests have been added to both the left and right side of the vertical axis.

Some chairs go outside of the boundaries of a typical chair's form and content, but still functions as a chair. This accordion chair excludes legs as support, but its block-like form supports itself. Unlike the stable form of a four-legged chair or an office chair, the accordion chair can be shifted into form and still function as a chair. With the chair's accordion-like feature, the char exhibits unity through a sense of continuity from one end of the chair to the other.