Parkinson, Bethany; Andrews, David; Magleby, Spencer (Brigham Young University)
Faculty Advisor: Magleby, Spencer (Brigham Young University, Mechanical Engineering)
Increasing worldwide urbanization is leading to a rising population of people living in apartments. Apartments typically have short leases, which lead to a high turnover rate, or number of renters that move in per year. For example, the 2018 turnover rate in New York City was 30.5%. People who move this often usually buy cheap furniture each time they change apartments, because carrying furniture on public transportation is impractical. The goal of our research is to create furniture that allows people who move often to avoid re-purchasing furniture. This goal leads to three design requirements. First, the furniture should be easily collapsed and deployed. This permits the furniture to be conveniently stored and transported. Ideally, the furniture could be deployed with one hand. Second, the furniture should be inexpensive, both in manufacturing processes and material selection. Lastly, the furniture should be aesthetically pleasing. We have utilized origami as a method to achieve these design objectives, because it can be deployed in one motion.
There are significant challenges to designing and implementing origami-inspired furniture. For example, any joints between the legs, seat, table, and back of the furniture need to allow not only for the furniture to be stable in its deployed state, but also to be flat in its non-deployed state. Additionally, the employed joints must account for the thickness of the material. Each type of joint that is adaptable to thick materials was therefore considered and analyzed in the specific loading situation of a chair. Using these criteria and three unique types of joints, a variety of chairs were conceptualized. After prototyping, each type of chair was expanded to create an entire family of furniture, including a table, stool, and couch. The principles and design approaches developed in this project have generated origami-inspired furniture that is easily transportable, functional, inexpensive, comfortable, and aesthetic.