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Here's What It Looks Like to Use Only Your Body to Make Furniture—No Machines or Tools Allowed
It takes an entire civilization to build a simple wood stool. I found this out the hard way by attempting to build furniture completely from scratch just using my body. From felling a tree with my bare hands to carving the wood using any means necessary, I realized that perhaps we as a culture are too reliant on our interconnected society.
Design Team
Designer: Nicholas Bentel
This stool is made entirely by chewing, scratching and chipping at found natural materials.
The bottom details of the stool in which no screws, glue or shimming were used.
Felling the tree
A typical stool bought online
The pieces of the stool made from scratch
Testing the different woods
When you buy any generic stool in the store, it is typically made from parts from all over the world. The processes and resources it takes just to bring a simple stool to your doorstep are immense. Consumers are completely unaware of the global systems we have become so reliant upon. Have we lost our understanding of how to produce products with what we have?
In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIexiGO3_k&t=1s), I design and create a stool made completely from scratch without using any machinery or tools. I just use my body for every possible step. To begin, I went into the woods and used my bare hands to knock down trees for lumber. This proved to be a lot harder then I expected, especially when trying to carry the wood back to the wood shop.
I then used every possible method to try to carve the wood to a precise measurement. This included biting and chewing on the wood to shape it. I even asked professional woodworkers to guide me along the way. In the end, we had to completely redesign the stool to conform to my bodies abilities.
Is it possible to survive without our everyday objects? Can we reinsert the human back into the human experience? This stool project is the first part of a six part series I am launching about design and how we as humans can become human again.
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Comments
Geez - Just sit on a log.
Does your dentist get any credit for this?
Making a design that is possible with less processing and raw materials that are easier to harvest, would have been better than replicating a machine manufactured item. However, thanks for an interesting article, this is the sort of content long time readers like me value on Core77. How about making this a reader challenge. The challenge could be: to make a piece of furniture that either seats a human or can contain / store an item of up to 5kg in weight.
I've got a greater challenge for you than making furniture without tools -- do it without youtube.
Your choice to slavishly imitate a manufactured stool shows a certain tunnel vision of design thinking. I see in the "Felling the tree" GIF there is an abundance of smaller branches. My first thought would be break off and gather a bunch, use some bark to tie into a horizontal bundle for a bench seat. Or use a vertical bundle with a nice flat rock for a seat. "I even asked professional woodworkers to guide me along the way." Why are tools bad but shared knowledge ok?
Would you rather see another horrible video of Eric Striebel making hideous garbage out of materials he doesn't understand in his surfeit of free time or a semi-interesting art project?
Ouch
You don't need an entire civilization to build simple tools like a sharpened stone which would surely have made this an easier process.
Maybe he should have made a few first for practice and then showed it to us.