The upcoming Dining Chair build is going to be pretty interesting. I’m in the process of working out the details and something fairly obvious just occurred to me: there’s no way I’m going to commit to building the six chairs Nicole is forcing me to build without confirming I actually like the design! That means a prototype is absolutely necessary. But how I do I fit the prototype into the video series? By simply making the series about the prototype! It’s one thing to watch me construct a chair from a pre-made plan. It’s a whole other ball of wax to see the design process and experience my thoughts and mistakes as we build the prototype together. The entire first video will be focused on extracting dimensions from other chairs I like and incorporating them into a new chair. More specifically, showing you what dimensions matter and how you might be able to make these sorts of decisions for yourself. I’ll be showing top-down views of my sketching process as I make full-size drawings and work my way toward actual templates. Even if the prototype isn’t perfect, you’ll be armed with all of the information you need to build our exact chair or one more suited to your tastes. 

So in the end, you will eventually have a set of plans. And folks who come along after the project goes into the archive will receive a set of plans. But for those of you coming on the journey with me this April, you’ll get to see the process in near real-time and possibly even influence some of the design decisions as we go. 

Whether I make changes to the prototype or not, I’ll also get some footage of me batching out my six chairs if only to show you some of the techniques and tools I’ll be using to speed up the process. 

If you’re not already subscribed to the Dining Chair project, you can either purchase the project individually or are part of the current Early Bird Bundle