Furniture Design Course

In this new course, I cover the furniture design topic. This is a topic near and dear to me as I believe that good design is essential in a quality furniture piece. Good design also minimizes wasted resources and provides a furniture maker with essential feedback and pause when creating furniture. Loosely translated, the design process keeps the maker from rushing into a potentially flawed furniture design. The checks and balances give pause to the process as well as streamlining the build. Developing your own style and furniture aesthetic is also covered. Selecting the right woods for your furniture design is critical in determining the appeal of the final furniture piece.

As with most woodworkers, I was anxious to build furniture early on. With the passage of time and several furniture projects completed, the anxiety of simply creating work had passed. It was far more important to create a well-designed and striking piece of furniture. So I delved into furniture design, studied with some renown furniture makers, and used this knowledge to establish a furniture design process that works.

In the online furniture design course you will learn the skills necessary to design and create your own unique furniture. Learn to develop your own style of furniture and aesthetic. Over 2 hours in total. Course features videos on these topics:

1. Furniture design overview, the history of furniture design
2. Becoming familiar with the furniture design process
3. Understand design process, bring your furniture designs to next level
4. How to select wood for a furniture design
5. Use of mockups and prototypes to develop a furniture design
6. In-depth use of mockups to develop a furniture design
7. Determining a furniture style for your own furniture designs
8. Selecting a furniture style and aesthetic
9. Developing a furniture design
10. Getting the proportions right in a furniture design
11. Using the dynamic design process in a furniture design
12. Use of maquettes and prototypes in a furniture design
13. Use of templates and CAD when designing your furniture

Artist Talk...

I was recently contacted about giving an Artist Talk to a local arts organization. It didn't take much to convince me, especially after the organizer mentioned I would be paid a honorarium for my efforts. I then began work on developing on a comprehensive power point slide show of the evolution of my furniture, wood sculpture, and wood art. Gathering all the photos and information of a six year period was probably the largest challenge. It was then a matter of piecing everything together in chronological order with notes and talking points for each slide.

There was a period of two years where I would create elaborate scale models of furniture to determine their appeal, I enjoyed talking about this period. I have since embraced CAD design and most of my design work originates on a computer with small maquettes created afterwards. Creating the scale models of furniture, many of which became sculptural work, was a prolific, exciting time for me. I began to experiment with combining alternative mediums to wood over this two year period.

Technical considerations such as how to attach metal to wood and how to attach glass to metal came up. The issue of expansion and contraction is somewhat different with extremely stable material such as metal and glass. Metal and glass don't noticeably expand or contract with environmental changes such as wood does. Another interesting technical issue that came up was the lack of a compression characteristic in metal. The slots or holes which I use to insert metal components need to be created very precisely for precision fitting. 

Working with metal also involves slightly different tools and processes. I don't even prepare the metal components in the work space I work with wood to not contaminate wood with metal filings. Once these issues were overcome, the design possibilities available to me were unlimited. The media I previously created my designs with was somewhat limited to different types of wood; domestic, exotic and figured. Today I can incorporate metal, glass and possibly stone in my work, along with my predominant medium of wood. 

Mockups...

Valuable information from an earlier post on a display cabinet design. After completing the main case of a display cabinet, work began to create the inner drawer case. The first step in the sequence was to get the proportions correct using a cardboard mock up of the drawer case. After a few iterations, the mock up in the photo was the preferred layout. The design considerations which used are as follows:

Height of the drawer case, number of drawers, width and height of individual drawers

A cardboard mock-up is a very important step in my opinion, as it serves to both provide a visual image of the drawer case and to point out any possible subtle issues with the layout. The drawer case is set back from the edge of the main case to allow for drawer handles and a little extra for the door stops. The drawers can be removed and individually placed on the top of the drawer case for better viewing. I debated whether to overlay the horizontal drawer dividers with the door fronts, but since all the wood is uniform and of the same species ( cherry), I would have the horizontal dividers visible. The components of the drawer case are for the most part dadoed and rabbeted together and the horizontal dividers each slide in between two grooves. The center vertical divider will be permanently attached to the drawer case. The rabbeted sides will also have a couple of dowels in each of four edges for reinforcement.

Since the cardboard mock-up is sized exactly to scale, I have the benefit of using it to size the components of the drawer case for milling and dimensioning. At this point, the boards used for the drawer case are sawn and they are allowed to stabilize before any further processing. This is to remove any inner stresses in the wood.

The individual drawers will have dovetailed drawer fronts and rabbeted backs and the bottom panel will be floating in a small groove on all four sides of the drawer. 

Scale models (maquettes)

The aXial Lounge Chair began as a sketch , drawings and a series of maquettes or scale models of the design. I typically sketch a design , then draw it either in pencil or through CAD software. This provides me the feasibility of the design... is it appealing? is it structurally sound? is it innovative?  I work through the design process and flesh out the final design using an iterative process. The design needs to be elegant, aesthetically appealing and sometimes innovative. 

In this case I introduced innovation into the aXial Lounge Chair through the X-pattern frame. Developing the design is an enjoyable process as I make an effort to reduce the number of components or finesse them while maintaining strength in the design. Chairs have a unique process since they need to endure different stresses as well as being aesthetically pleasing. You can see the progression in the size and detail of the scale models in the attached image. The next step is a full size scale model and drawing of the main components of the design. Full size drawings enable me to accurately create the components through repeatability.