I’ve often said that in the wonderful world of product design, a sure sign that you’ve made it is that your chair design gets produced by a company like Flos. There’s a certain top-down process here where a designer will decide what context a chair lives in and the company sells that dream to the end consumer in glossy magazines.
If however, you want to see a chair be a coffin, a taxi, be used to hang someone, in a church, a bar, or in a home, go see Steven Berkoff’s play adaptation of On the Waterfront, which I went to see with Matt, at the Hackney Empire.
He uses the chair not as a simple prop but as a character in itself, more than you can say for most designers.