Courtesy Cohda Design

Today, designers are excited about surfaces. "Surface" has been around for the last fifty or so years,  but architects and product designers have new materials, techniques and (arguably) responsibilities that inform surfaces to be more than just superficial.  

The RD chair hits all these notes. Using recycled plastic as a malleable medium, Cohda Design has created a chair that follows a set of guidelines yet is never exactly the same. The intelligence of the product is in the basic form of the jig, a series of pegs that create the armature for the plastic to be woven around. The result is a chair that has all the qualities of avant-garde computation, with the fabrication smarts of a Ford Model T. 

For the last fifteen years we have heard at academic reviews, read in design journals and seen built attempts at using digital information to create massively customized built work. While one hopes that our recent foray into built information modelling allows tighter controls at certain scales, at The Functionality we're curious if we can both be massively custom and locally standard?