SIT LIKE A LADY
ABOUT
460 x 490 x 950mm
Victorian Ash
2016
Sit Like a Lady is named as it moulds you to sit in a feminine manner and take up less space, which women are socialised to do. The tapering seat keeps your legs together, the 90 degree backrest makes you sit up straight, and the armrest keeps your arms within your body’s restricted frame. This challenges the male default, that is perpetuated by furniture designers, that comfort and relaxation are provided seats that taper outwards or at least are no smaller at the knees than at the back to allow the legs to spread (colloquially termed 'Man-spreading'). Due to the small dimensions, many people cannot sit in the chair, demonstrating how alienating gender norms can be.
PROCESS
In an ergonomics workshop with Isabel Moore, we added adjustments to existing chairs to make it fit our bodies, and obtained our ideal measurements for a chair.
In a prototyping workshop with Jon Goulder, our brief was to design structurally sound chair out of thin planks with minimal waste. I used the measurements, combined with triangulation for strength, to make scale model, and a full size prototype.
My measurements, and the angles calculated to connect them
One side of the prototype