Thesis Defence: Elizabeth Lenny

The thesis began with a desire to better understand the built environment and its relationship to value, temporality and material. The stool and chair became the vehicle for this exploration. In its ubiquity the seat has found a special place in the world of design through the way it relates to the body, its structure, and ability to respond to cultural context. Over the course of the past sixteen months, I have made nineteen seats iteratively to understand the process of their becoming.

While making the seats I developed three lenses: making, material, and design. These three lenses expand the scope of the design process. Through this expansion, the process begins with the life of the material, through the process of fabrication and design, into work. The resulting work is understood holistically through its many phases of becoming.

Through this holistic understanding, the seats become a network of relations. These relations make the consumption and replacement of the seats consequential. The seats’ value changes. It is no longer a product but rather a process.