Eames Chair Research

My initial research consisted of taking out 3 books from the library, one on Eames's history and the other 2 on chair and product design design throughout the past 50 years. When I was given the subject of Eames chairs, I felt like I wanted to continue my project within this because i found reading the history behind chair design quite interesting. I liked how you can the influences taken from other chairs and this gave me an idea of trying to make a family tree out of some of most well recognised or iconic chairs. After researching in more depth I found it too hard to create a tree that really reflected each chairs influence. Some appear much more strongly influenced than others. I found it very interesting how looking at lots of comercialy manufactured chairs for airports school and hospitals looked like they took huge influence from a lot of the Eames designs. This was what really gave me the idea of a family tree of chairs. 

I got my friend who is in France at the moment to take some pictures for me when he went and visited a chair museum, he sent me back some really interesting pictures.

I started looking at more info graphic themed family trees to see who they would work, I liked the style these had been done in and was something I wanted to try and replicate. 

I started by drawing out all the chairs I had selected through my research, I found a really useful website that had listed a lot of commercially produced chairs starting from the first chair put into mass production in 1859 the Side Chair No. 14 created by Thonet in Austria. 

My first attempt at creating a family tree didn't go so well, I felt there wasn't enough correlation between the chairs that would link them together, some fitted together well and made sense but there would be other chairs that wouldn't have any relevance to any others.

After deciding that the family tree idea wasn't going to work the way I would have liked it too I went back to research to see what else I could do. I found some really interesting chair posters that made me decide to make one myself. I wanted to keep it in the same style as I started the the family tree in because I quite like the illustrative style.

I liked the style of the opticians poster I think it works well, but I wanted my poster to make sense or have some relevance.