the story of the Asterisk stool - part 3

We're telling the story of the famous Roscoe Jackson Asterisk Stool's long and winding road to maturity.  If you want to start from the beginning read part 1 and part 2.  Part 2 ended with a flawed prototype that people kind of liked and and a yawning knowledge chasm that Shawn and I needed to jump over.  In other words Roscoe Jackson had a poorly executed example of a decent idea and no idea of how to sell it.

Part 3 starts after a couple months of coaxing feedback out of "I'm sooooo jetlaggted from my trip to Milan and anyway I've seen it all so can you please just get out of my store with your prototype and that ugly shirt" furniture retailers.  Some of the hippest, toughest, most jaded professionals we knew grudgingly conceeded that we might actually have something in the Asterisk.  Shawn and I decided to get serious about engineering it.

We knew that the Asterisk needed a rigid inner structure.  All the crazy angles would make it really challenging to build using the tools and materials we were most familiar with - glue, screws, wood, hammers, saws and Busch Light.  I can't remember exactly how we came up with the idea for making the inner structure out of folding parts but once it hit we were off to the races.  We spent a few weeks working on a design in CAD:

Next we built a 1/4 scale model in foam core:

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It looks great but will it last?

Sometimes the answer is no.  These are the first recycled plastic chairs we ever made back in 2007.  They were far from perfect.  We knew we had a lot to learn about recycled plastic, making chairs, making money, etc. so it was a good place to start.  Here's a picture of my good buddy Robb trying them out.  In his front yard.  In January.  In Detroit.

The look on Robb's face indicates his high level of tolerance for my puppylike enthusiasm about our  prototypes.  You're a good man for going out in the snow to try out our new chair, Robb.

Even though we've made a lot of chairs since then the we kept the prototypes around.  They've travelled a lot of miles and supported a lot of butts since 2007.  In fact we were using them in our dining room until a couple of weeks ago when I sat on one and heard a cracking sound.

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WWII design inspiration

Besides being lethal, expensive and sometimes necessary war has a way of putting a damper on fun stuff.  Specifically I'm thinking about fun stuff like fabulous looking, environmentally sensitive durable American made modern furniture, of course.  War means humans have screwed up (again) and things are going to have to get real bad for a bunch of people before they get better.  Roscoe Jackson appreciates the fighting men and women who make sacrifices to protect our way of life and we hope someday they won't have to fight.

So what does this have to do with our aforementioned concern with sexy furniture?  Well, war is bad but sometimes the exigencies of violent combat can lead to inovations in design-the Vickers Wellington bomber is a case in point.

The Wellington was lighter and stronger than comparable aricraft in WWII becase its designers took a chance on a radical construction method.  If you've ever built a balsa wood model plane then you know how most contemporary airplanes were constructed-ribs and spars:

There's nothing inherently wrong with ribs and spars as long as nobody is trying to shoot your airplane down.  One good hit to a wing spar can render the structure of a traditional plane...er...non-structural.   Wellingtons, however, earned a reputation for surviving damage that would have sent other planes spiraling into the dirt.

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the story of the Asterisk stool - part 2

I thought I could tell how we developed our Asterisk stools in a concise manner.  Naturally it's taking longer than I thought it would.  Doesn't everything?

Anyway, maybe you read part 1 of how we came up with the idea for a star shaped - no, wait - asterisk shaped chair, then built a very large prototype, then realized that we had created a bulky monster that was impossible to sit on and difficult to love.

Our next move was to literally cut the prototype down to size by taking it apart and making each part about 1/3 smaller.  Here's what it looked like:

Still too big and we hadn't even been able to sit on it yet.

Time went by and the prototype went into the dumpster.  We can't remember exactly how we arrived at redesigning our fatally flawed chair into a possibly usable stool but within a couple of months (and untold Busches Light) we were out of the Asterisk chair business and into the Asterisk stool business!

We wanted to try making the stool out of a stack of foam.  Simple, right?  I emailed drawings to 4 or 5 foam companies and chatted with them on the phone.  Guess what - they all said it was a crazy way to build furniture.  Naturally we didn't believe these experienced professionals.  We wanted foam!!!

One of our neighbors gave us a huge piece of polyurethane foam that was once part of a very sketchy circular 80's folding bed/couch thing.  Let's just say we're glad this particular piece of furniture couldnt talk.  We cut it up for the sake of experimentation:

Yes that's an electric carving knife.  It works great for cutting foam, especially if your wife is not looking when you sneak out of the kitchen with it.

We played around with the foam for a few weeks and convinced ourselves that a stack of asterisk - shaped slabs of it would be just the ticket.  We bought a some sheets of foam and cut them into asterisks using a plywood template, a Sharpie and a band saw.  Ta da!

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Design Harvest friends

This morning I put on a pair of socks that I bought in Chicago during Design Harvest.  October 2010 seems like a long time ago but the socks are hanging in there like a pair of champs.  The cold really snuck up on Shawn and me that weekend.  Anyway I went back through our pictures from Design Harvest and found some other designers that you should know about.

Whoa.  Before you read any further - spend all your money on Roscoe Jackson furniture, win the lottery, buy more of our stuff for your loved ones, THEN buy furniture from these folks.  Just bidness.

Jason Lewis was our next door neighbor at the show.  He's a local Chicago craftsman who steadfastly refuses to brag about his extremely high quality, perfectly proportioned furniture.

www.jasonlewisfurniture.com

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