Taekhan Yun on designing enjoyable and playful chairs for teenagers

A toddler sits in entrance of a clean piece of paper and is requested a easy query: What would a chair constructed in your physique seem like? Well, it’s going to in all probability look rather a lot like one from Chair for Kids. After the drawings, the measurements, the small clay prototypes, the eventual riot of brightly colored completed chairs organized in a courtyard, this mission is certainly one of two tasks that Taekhan Yun considers amongst his most significant up to now. And it’s, on the floor, a really simple thought that’s completely shaped – particularly for the youthful technology.

Taekyun was born in Seoul, studied design in France and is presently primarily based in Cambodia, a journey that has formed a observe outlined by responsiveness. “As I move through different places, my work has evolved to remain flexible, rather than being fixed to a single style, responding instead to each specific situation,” he says. His time in France proved formative, and dealing alongside individuals from various backgrounds led him to grasp that design shouldn’t be a solely creation of objects, however “a process and a way of forming relationships”. That shift from product to course of is the hinge on which the whole lot he makes now turns. 

When beginning a chunk, Taekyun begins with remark, drawn from the feel of wherever he occurs to be residing. Children perched on adult-sized chairs in class lecture rooms. Discarded furnishings is piled on the road, ready for somebody to see its second life. The continued use of bamboo scaffolding throughout Southeast Asia and Hong Kong – a standard materials holding up the trendy metropolis. “Rather than focusing first on how to make something,” he explains, “I begin by considering what story I want to tell and what meaning it should carry. I then reinterpret these situations from different perspectives, simplifying or transforming them through a series of quick sketches.”

Form, for Taekyun, isn’t the start. It is extra about what emerges on the finish of a means of trying, sketching, making and adjusting. “I prefer a process in which the form develops through making. The properties of materials and the variables that arise during fabrication naturally influence the outcome.”

Chair for Kids is an apt instance of this, wherein youngsters are requested to measure, draw, and picture a chair that might truly match them quite than the grownup world they inhabit. The ensuing clay prototypes are tiny and utterly particular person, a area of small types that seem like an archaeological dig. Then the completed chair is vivid, barely eccentric and constructed for various heights and proportions. “Working with children allows forms and ideas to evolve beyond the methods or expectations I initially set,” he says. “This unpredictability and the changes that emerge from it are the reasons why I value these projects.”

Meanwhile, the Rebirth Project operates equally at a special scale. It includes discarded furnishings collected from the road, reassembled into new types, and given a second life by means of the making course of. In each circumstances, the work is not actually in regards to the object produced, however quite about what occurs between the individuals who produce it. “I hope that the audience does not stop simply thinking, ‘This is a beautiful object,'” he says, “but instead follows the background and context in which the work was created, as well as the story contained within it.” For him, design is a approach of shifting views. “I think that allowing familiar things to be perceived differently is also an important role of design.”

Next up is the Birdhouse mission, once more made with youngsters, solely this time he is asking them to show their consideration outward and to contemplate and perceive others, quite than simply themselves. It’s a pure subsequent step, as a result of after the chair, which begins with the physique, comes the query of what lies past it.